How to record tv on a laptop

[geordiepaul]

I am hoping to be able to hook up my acer aspire 3610 laptop to watch/record tv.

I have a cable connection in my house, along with a specialist cable box - how can I do this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am pulling my hair out here

[steveryan]

Any of these would suit - http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/pages/products/prods_usb.html

Or if you want a freeview card -
http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=18809
http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=23036

[geordiepaul]

Can any of these be conected to a cable tv 'f' connector?

They all seem to support freeview, but I don't want to have to connect to my terrestrial ariel.

[steveryan]

I don't know what an F connector is. The Hauppauge cards seem to have composite and audio in so you'll have to use those to connect to your cable box.

[GMaq]

Hi,
I use a Plextor ConvertX PX-M402U USB 2, (www.plextor.com) with my Dell laptop to record and watch TV from my Satellite Box, You need to have a Composite or S-Video out on your cable box as it doesn't have an"F" Connector, but if you care at all about quality you don't want to use that anyway. The software that comes with it doesn't have a scheduler to time with recordings but this device works well with Nero-Vision, Beyond TV, GB-PVR, Chris TV and iuVCR as well. The M402U is also unique because it has HARDWARE DivX and MPEG-2 encoding which can give great quality in both MPEG and AVI formats and doesn't use much of your laptop CPU, which is much better for the laptop. I am quite pleased with mine, but also hear a lot of good things about the Hauppage USB products. I paid $122.00 CDN for my Plextor on sale.

[jameshgross]

The Hauppauge WINTV PVR USB2 has connections for RF (cable - ant) Composite, S-Video.
I connect the RF on mine directly to the cable system to watch basic cable and connect the S-video to the cable box for digital and pay-per-view. WINTX2000 SW works very well.
I am using a DELL C600 Latitude.

[olyteddy]

I second (third?) the hauppauge PVR USB2. Had mine for over a year and a half now, watching Columbo even as I type this.