Please suggest TV tuner card....

[Oyjord]

Hi all, I'm considering buying Beyond TV and making an old PC I have sitting around our media center. I don't need anything fancy, but browsing through Beyond TV's suggest TV-tuner card list almost made my head explode. We won't have any fancy TV input, digital cable at best. But, I would like TV-out capabilities on the card as well. Also, I read many of the hardware-decoding cards, though suggested, only decode mpeg2. What above some of the divx movies I'd like to watch? Could I use a software decoder to watch them despite having a hardware-decoding card? It seems everyone recommends Hauppage, and that's fine, but can someone please help me narrow down my choices? Again, I'm just basically looking to watch TV (non-HD) and also TV-out it from the same PC to my TV (S-video would be fine, don't need anything fancy). Thanks for the suggestions, Oy.

[tscales]

You can watch you DVI movies regardless of how you capture new TV.

Recording requires one card, output to s-video requires another (your video card).

For recording, I like the Hauppauge PVR-150 or the HVR-1600. The HVR-1600 is on sale almost all the time and is a dual tuner, one SD and one OTA HD. Even if you don't use the OTA HD part, the card is cheaper. I saw it on sale for $60 this week (one of the big box stores).

For output, does your current video card have s-video out? Most recent ones do. For SD, darn near any card above an nVidia FX5200 or ATI 9200 will work.

Let us know a little more of your computer's specs and we can help more.