TV Cable to LCD Monitor

[Cypha22]

Hello,

I've been reading many forums for a few days on ways to connect tv cable to your monitor or vice versa. I guess I just don't have enough knowledge of the whole situation or I would have figured it out by now.

First off, I just want to know if it's possible to connect regular tv cable to your LCD Monitor possibly with a special cable or going through the PC? I have an 8800GTX with 2x DVI ports and 1 Svideo port. The monitor has 1x VGA and 1x DVI port on it. What might I need to run this set up as far as hardware or software goes?

Secondly, through the research I did do I found that running HDTV through an LCD Monitor requires more effort, but how much? What hardware or software might one need to do this?

I've found names of hardware and software listed in other forums I've been reading but when I track the actual product down online it doesn't list specifics needed to work or run. So I'm at a loss

[yoda313]

First of all I'd suggest editing out your email address unless you want oodles of spam in it.

Second of all for standard def cable either get a vga box that will accept coax to vga conversions which you can get at radioshack or probably bestbuy/circuit city.

Another option is to get a cheapo capture device for under 50.00. Go no name or stripped down if all you want is to watch the tv and not record than quality really won't matter. But than you would need your computer on if you want to use the capture device.

Use a vga switch box if you don't want to have your computer on and just use the monitor. - you could pipe it through a vcr/dvd recorder first so you have a tuner to use.

[Cypha22]

What if I wanted to run HDTV, is it just the same, buy that 50$ box you spoke of?
Also, I don't have any VGA cables, is there a DVI box ? :P

[yoda313]

HDTV is another animal all together. You'll have to go higher end.

[edDV]

You will need an ATSC/Analog TV tuner for the computer (PCI card or USB2). For cable it's nice to have QAM tuning as well. The tuner tunes the over the air or cable channels. No HD over cable without QAM capability and then it will only be the locals.

Your 8800GTX will provide the MPeg2 decode acceleration and formatting control. The monitor can connect to the PC over DVI-D or VGA.

[tgm4883]

On the other hand, if you have a cable box you can stream HD from it to your computer over firewire. Providing the channels you want to watch don't have copy control flags.

[edDV]

On the other hand, if you have a cable box you can stream HD from it to your computer over firewire. Providing the channels you want to watch don't have copy control flags.

Right, and the HD box to IEEE-1394, QAM tuner and analog tuner can all be recording at the same time with BeyondTV or SageTV PVR software. I haven't found a way to watch the MPeg2TS stream from IEEE-1394 live on the computer but it is easy to record.

[tgm4883]

On the other hand, if you have a cable box you can stream HD from it to your computer over firewire. Providing the channels you want to watch don't have copy control flags.

Right, and the HD box to IEEE-1394, QAM tuner and analog tuner can all be recording at the same time with BeyondTV or SageTV PVR software. I haven't found a way to watch the MPeg2TS stream from IEEE-1394 live on the computer but it is easy to record.

Can't help you there, as I use linux and MythTV. MythTV also doesn't watch it live, rather it records it to the hard drive and plays it back from the hard drive at the same time, creating actually about a 4 second delay between live tv and viewed tv.