Some recent PCs have a TV card normally provided at a price here you can have one for less than £30, you also get Teletext, Window in Windows and a personal PVR.
Buy Now...
Hauppauge have made a range of TV cards for many years, they also do models for satellite channels and some that also cover TV and Radio. However I have yet to come across one at sub £30.
Installation is a matter of finding a free PCI slot and attaching the supplied fly lead from the card to the line in socket of your sound card. Finally attach a co axial lead to the socket on the card. Thats all there is to the hardware installation.
Next install the software, this is all from one menu so should take only a few minutes. The setup needs a little care to select correctly and then watch your channels being located. It is possible to have a range of inputs but I just used the ones coming down my ariel. For ease of selection I suggest you rename the channel numbers to BBC, Channel 4 etc.
There are two TV applications installed WinTV32 and WinTV2000 both worked well. The Teletext service can run in a separate Window, however I found if you opened the Teletext service and then either of TV services it produces an error. So open TV before Teletext.
Pages from Teletext can be saved or printed and this can be useful as a lot of the information could be reused in other applications.
It is possible to record a program while you are watching but perhaps far more useful is the Schedule feature that allows recording like a VCR. However be aware that this takes around 1MB a minute of hard disc space. The features in Schedule allow repeated recordings (same time every day, same day every week etc) as a single entry.
The quality of the picture should be as good as that on your own TV, however there are options that appear in the interface and preferences that are greyed out because these features are not available, such as stereo and radio. But I can forgive this as the product has been produced at such a keen price.
There are still lots of features that are only normally available in some other products that cost a great deal more. The manual is in .PDF format and I admit I had to check it a few times during the review period. For instance Teletext will not update a page once selected without a tick mark on one of the menu preferences, I would have thought tick not to update would have more logical.
At the price if you need a TV card this is a certain winner and the ability to use it as a PVR and to store Teletext information are added bonuses. A quick surf on the net found DABS, the cheapest at £27.
Links :
www.hauppauge.co.uk
http://www.dabs.com/uk/productView.htm?quicklinx=2MP2
!!
