TV Card for xp

[spanner_razor]

Hi guys, am looking for a tv card in the uk that can pick up freeview channels and preferably record and plays at the same time.

Would prefer one from:

www.ebuyer.com

or

www.cclonline.com

It needs to work on xp pro sp2 and I don't want it to radically alter the way my machine looks, i.e. I just want to load one program to use the card. Obviously I need to buy from the uk suppliers.

 

[spanner_razor]

Anyone know anything about them and prepared to post?

 

[comrade]

I've had good luck with tv tuner cards from Avermedia. I used one for several years with XP Pro, and now I've got one I bought that works fine with both XP and Vista.

I think the first net vendor you mention has at least one their cards.

 

[spanner_razor]

Does that support freeview, i.e. does it have a digital tuner inbuilt as i want a card to be able to use digital when analogue signal is switched off in 2 or 3 years.

 

[comrade]

I'm pretty sure it's only analog. If you look at the picture of it, it has the old style metal 'can' tuner. Two of them, actually.

At the price of it, you could use it for a couple of years and then pick up a new digital one when the supply of those is better and cheaper.

If they ever do switch off the analog broadcasting, I'm sure there will be cheap converters to allow all of those old analog TV's out there to still work!

 

[spanner_razor]

Yeah, can it pick up freeview channels at all or would i have to get a freeview box that went to the card and then out to the ariel point?

 

[glupee]

I think this might be what you're looking for.


http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/27669

and this one's a little fancier. Watch one channel record the another
also I think this one used hardware encoding while the previous definately doesn't. This is nice so that the rest of your machine doesn't lag as much incase u wanna do something else while recording/watching tv.

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/113946

 

[spanner_razor]

Thanks, wanted to check for xp compatability really and whether it did freeview and i can't see that the cheaper one would have freeview capability yet the more expensive wouldn't. After all the more expensive one is dual digital