Searching for Good (Cheap) Card With TV Tuner

My system is a P3-666 running Windows 98SE. Although I'm getting flawless performance from my existing GeForce card, I'm thinking of replacing it with a card that allows TV-in so that I can play my PSOne/PS2/Gamecube over my computer monitor.

Secondarily, I'd also like to make video captures from my VCR and DVD player.

Does anyone have any recommendations as to the best low-end (translation: as cheap as humanly possible) cards are available on the market? AGP, PCI add on, USB... any and all would be fine.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks, but my research indicates that the $14 card you mentioned is a bad investment. Remember, I said I was looking for a *good* inexpensive card.

So, on the one hand, I'm not looking to go high end with one of those ATI All-one-Mother cards, but on the other hand I don't want to waste money on something just because it's comfortably priced in the K-Mart range. There's got be a happy medium.

Ideally, I wouldn't want to pay more than $40-$50, as that's what I spent on my NVidia GeForce2 MX.

Are MSI TV Tuners good?

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This reminds me of a card trick, pick a card, any card. Pretty much all video cards come with Tv-Out, except for the really old ones I suppose.

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Go Emachines...

Your responses are appreciated.

Incidentally, those of you with TV tuner cards, do you hook your cable directly to your video card, or do you attach it to your VCR and run a S-Video cable (or whatever it's called) from the VCR to your PC?

I understand interference from the PC sometimes distorts signals when the cable line is connected directly to the TV tuner card.

I've narrowed down my choices between the ATI TV Wonder Pro (PCI) and Hauppauge WinTV USB. Both are a bit over what I was originally willing to spend, but no problemo.

After doing more reading on TV tuners, I'm intrigued with the idea of turning my PC into a VCR. But with an "ancient" P3-666 and a low-end card, can my system even do the job?

Other questions: do the aforementioned cards have problems synching video and sound during playback? Also, how good are their picture quality controls?

As always, thanks in advance.

I wouldn't use either of those. First of all, the ATI TV-Wonder has some pretty horible drivers, especially if you're running XP. And any USB tuner is FAR too slow for quality capture, USB is only 1.2MB/s! That's 10 megabit devided by 8 to get megabytes. And to furhter your problems, neither of these offers hardware compression, and the PIII 667 IS too weak to compress that signal at resonable resolutions. And it gets even worse with USB once again.

Well, you could record at relatively low resolutions, like 320x240...and use a similar TV card from MSI or Leadtek, to get more universal drivers, since your budget doesn't allow for a hardware-compression card such as Hauppauge's WinPVR series.

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(Groan.) Maybe I should hold off until I can afford a real tuner card.

For future ref: who makes the best TV tuner cards, whose cards blow, and what's the minimum I can expect to pay to get real bang for my buck?

(And, oh yeah, do you think my P3-666/Win98SE/128RAM system is sufficient for the job?)

Thanks. It does sound like a great card for a great price.

Unfortunately... customer reviews at Newegg indicate the MSI @nywhere card has incompatibility problems with GeForce cards. Several reviewers complained they had to completely disable their NVidia driver and install the Windows generic driver instead just to get their GeForce card to work with MSI.