#Best tv tuner for pc install
#Best tv tuner for pc tv

#Best tv tuner for pc tv

(One limitation of current commodity TV cards is that they canвЂ™t scan the whole range of 500+ channels available on cable or satellite service.) Scanning channels may take a few minutes. The card scans through available channels from 1 to upwards of 115. Select Options, Channel Scan, and then Start when the new window appears. You may have to use another protocol if you are in another location. Next, select Options, TV Norm, and select NTSC if youвЂ™re in the United States. You need to pick the correct channel type for your area. Once youвЂ™ve started motv, right-click anywhere in the video picture on the screen to see the motv control window, which lets you select Options and Frequency Table. When I made the connection, pardon the pun, I felt pretty doofy. The first time I used a TV card I sat there wondering why I couldnвЂ™t hear anything, while puzzling at the little male-to-male audio cable that came with the card. And donвЂ™t forget to plug the audio output of the TV card into the line input on your audio card. You may need to start a sound mixer program, such as Kmix or smixer, to adjust sound settings. To watch TV with motv, begin by making sure your cable TV coax is screwed into the back of the TV tuner card and that you have a good TV signal. You can set the video source to the TV tuner, a composite video input, or USB video input, depending on what devices you have hooked up. It first appear on the screen as a window that displays whatever video source is connected at the time. You can start it from the command line or from the SUSE start menu under Multimedia and Video. motv should be available if you load the xawtv package. ItвЂ™s actually a cool front end to the xawtv program, which weвЂ™ll discuss shortly. Motv is my favorite TV program because of its easy-to-use, mature user interface. Setup and operation are very similar across the three programs. IвЂ™ll use one as an example for setup and operation, then point out some particulars youвЂ™ll want to know about two other packages. There are several such TV programs in the SUSE 8.2 package, all of them mature and easy to use.

#Best tv tuner for pc install

When you install Linux youвЂ™ll want to look up the TV applications that your distribution supports. The beauty of a distribution like SUSE is that you can use the GUI utilities or the command line, depending on your abilities and knowledge. ItвЂ™s a good mix of GUI-based and вЂњdo it yourselfвЂќ configuration tools. Naturally youвЂ™ll need to have Linux running on your TV box.

My setup uses a BrightHouse Network cable feed. Hook your computer up to TV input, like a cable connection or external antenna feed. KDE comes up slowly, applications take a long time to load, and action on the picture is jerky. IвЂ™ve run TV cards on old Pentiums with 64 MB of memory and the performance is just OK.

Similar issues come up with regular computer memory, although theyвЂ™re not as pronounced as video memory. ItвЂ™s possible to make the picture bigger, to a limited extent, but it shows horizontal lines and noticeable lags in movements as you increase the window size and keep memory size constant. At 8 MB youвЂ™ll get a clear picture at about 480Г—320. For example, with a 4 MB video card, you can expect a nice color picture in a window of about 200Г—100 pixels. Increasing video memory allows for a larger TV window on the screen and better picture quality. IвЂ™ve found that the main factors influencing performance are video memory, followed by main memory. Obviously, you can put a TV card in a more current desktop machine and be quite happy.

Mouse and keyboard (these are optional).

Hauppauge Win-TV BT878-based TV tuner card.133 MHz Pentium CPU, jumpered to run at 187 MHz.My Linux TV machine is a classic Pentium desktop box with the following components:

вЂњObsoleteвЂќ hardware is a beautiful thing, when you can make it do productive work again. The hardware requirements, at $20 for a TV card after rebates, are pretty modest, and the payoff is a lot of fun. WouldnвЂ™t it be nice to sit at your Linux machine and have a crisp little color TV screen right there in one of your desktop windows? Using a cheapo TV tuner card, you can get great picture and sound quality on anything from an old 133 MHz Pentium on up.