HDTV Capture Hardware Recommendations Needed

[mysticgohan17]

From what I've been told, by friends and such, I need 2 things:

• HDTV Antenna
  HDTV Capture Card

Am I missing anything and does anyone know a specific brand and model, or a site with alot of good options to choose from?

edit: and it'd be a major plus if i I could capture from standard broadcast TV/VHs/etc as well, to save me from buying another card specifically for that.

[John2001]

The FusionHDTV 3 might be what you're looking for. Besides capturing off air HDTV it also has a regular tuner and uses the Conexant CX23881 chip. You can also capture standard def TV shows broadcast over the digital channel and scale down to 640x480 for archiving. These will be perfect captures free of snow or ghosting. One other advantage that I like because I'm still using a SDTV and play files from my PC via s-video is that the Fusion will use the overlay (I have the Fusion 2).

You don't really need a special HDTV antenna. Most HDTV is broadcast over UHF so you just need a regular antenna (either rooftop or indoor) if you're in the city or a rooftop directional UHF antenna if you're in a rural area.

[handyguy]

There are hdtv cards you can buy for your PC. But I think that hdtv capture requires so much HD space that even a bluray recorder can only capture about 2.5 hours on a 23 gig disk.

[mysticgohan17]

Just a quick follow up. Homebrewed software seems to work very well in the area of video editing/production etc, are there any freeware tools that are good with HDTV I should check out?