Its possible to have two TV cards in just one single computer?

[BlooderButcher]

Well... let me explain...

I'd like to have something like a VCR and a TV in the same computer.... I mean, while one channel is recording I'm watching another.

Considering an webcam is registered as a "video device" and a TV card is the same I think it's possible to have two different "video devices" in one computer.

Well... I don't know if this is possible due issues related to Overlay and DirectDraw surfaces (or other way of displaying the video)

I have two capture cards, one Pixelview PV-4900M (BT878 based) and one old Avermedia TV Phone 98 (BT848 based) and I'm wanting to have the Avermedia act just like a normal TV and the other one will be my VCR.

Is that possible?

[SHS]

That not going work with AVI capture card you need to hardware mpeg2 encoder

[BlooderButcher]

Well... I forgot to mention the following...

- The Avermedia TV Phone will use its own TV application that comes with the card, so it will act only as a simple TV viewer.

- And the PixelView will use another video recorder application, probably WinVDR.

But the problem I think would be with audio issues.... I mean, maybe I will have to attach two CD cables in my Sound Blaster Live and try to capture the audio from.

- Line, CD
- Aux, CD
- Line, Aux

Or I could use the audio chipset of my motherboard... and two separated speakers. or in other words, two tv cards and two sound cards... so I think the audio issues will be gone.

Well... Windows can use two or more sound cards, but of course it only can select only one audio input and only one audio output at a time. But the sound system is capable of mixing the sounds... coming from both cards.

A few years ago... I already did put an Awe32 (EMU8000) and one SB Live (EMU10k1) together in one single computer. I still love an Awe32... :P

What I would like to know is if the Overlay/DirectDraw display surface could interfer with the other one.

[guns1inger]

I have seen this done, but only when the cards were the same, so avoid clashes with drivers and software. You can get dual tuner cards as well. We have a server that has three dual tuner cards recording 6 digital streams to raid for around 14 hours per day, This set up holds around two weeks worth of footage from which we extract shows for longer term storage a streaming. These are encoded to Divx and stored on a multi-TB NAS unit. However this is a tried and trusted solution.

What you are hoping to do is likely to be more fraught and more likely to fail because of incompatibilities and because the cards have not be designed to play well with others.

[BlooderButcher]

Thank you... guns1inger!!!