Advantages: Watch TV on your PC! Record TV programmes with your PC! Record your home made videos onto your PC! So ruddy cheap! Disadvantages: Needs PC to work, sound is mono, has to be PCI version to be cheap.
. Now how does a child like him manage to get a TV Card with his sort of pocket money and get good quality for his money? Simple! He went and bought himself a HauppaugeWinTV Express card.
This card is an analogue type card (meaning that it isn't digital) that arrives in a rather large box unbefitting the contents that are contained within. You get merely the TV Card, audio cable to link the card to your sound card, manual and software CD. You can hear it rattling around inside the box as you shake it, the box blatantly wasting precious card with all that space. But although I mourn the trees' wasted timbre (ish), the card itself is a very high quality piece of equipment.
Unpacking the card was a cinch seeing as there wasn't much packaged in the first place. Installing it was easy as pie as well, requiring you to dismantle your PC ...
Advantages: Ecellent picture quality & ease of use Disadvantages: Bit pricy
found on the internet cheaper than this. I have seen it on one site for £80+ pounds sterling, with returned units being sold from around from £60+.
Considering the Video Capture unit I was about to buy would have cost me £80, and my existing internal TV card cost me around £30 a few years ago, I did feel it was a reasonable purchase.
I have to say I am impressed with the quality of TV image I receive, it is far superior to what I have been used to from my existing internal card, and I now have an encoder to allow me to capture my old camcorder videos too.
The unit is made by Hauppauge and is called WinTV, PVR2, personal video recorder.
www.hauppauge.com ...
Advantages: It's cheap, teletext feed. Disadvantages: it's really, really hard to install.
I should start by saying that I'm a PC enthusiast. I work with them all day. The PC on which I'm writing this was built by own fair hand, and when new was the fastest and best computer I'd used. Even three years later I've had no real urge for any upgrades save a doubling of RAM I installed for good measure.
Then came my nemesis. It arrived through the back door of a broken TV, and a careless visit to PC World. The language of the World I lived in shortly afterwards was anything but PC.
The box clearly states that the card works with Windows 2000. Which is still my operating system of choice. The instruction booklet even leads you step by step through the win2k installation. Which as a confirmed "plug and play" happy go lucky kinda guy I was a little disgruntled resorting to. However I then came to the quite amusing conclusion ...
Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, Microsoft Windows 2000 / XP, Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition, Microsoft Windows 2000 / XP, Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition, Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition
Windows XP Media Center Edition - Pentium 4 - 1.2 GHz
Windows 2000/ME/XP - Pentium 4 - 1.2 GHz, Windows XP Media Centre Edition 2005 - 1.3 GHz - RAM 256 MB
Software Included
Drivers & Utilities
Manufacturer's product description
Just plug the WinTV-PVR-150 MCE into an open PCI slot in your PC, install the Media Center driver, and you can watch TV with Media Center's MyTV button! WinTV-PVR-150 MCE allows you to upgrade your Media Center PC or laptop by adding a TV tuner and FM radio. Record your favorite TV shows to your hard disk, or pause live TV and create your own instant replay! The WinTV-PVR-150 uses a hardware MPEG-2 encoder, so you don't slow down your PC while recording. With MPEG data rates from 2 to 8Mbits/sec, you decide how much hard disk space your videos will consume (the lower the data rates, the less disk space your videos will consume, but with lower video quality).
