Help Me Find the Right TV Card for What I Am Trying to Do

[boatboy63]

I am somewhat a newbie to this TV card stuff, but I have been trying to read up on it to get familiar with it. Still, I cannot find the specific answers to some of the questions I have.

First of all, I am looking for a card to add to my current computer so that I can watch live TV and record programs and also be able to use the Time Shift function (not all at the same time though). I also want a card that I can use to connect to a camcorder so that I can burn home movies onto a CD.

(This is where I am getting confused)...I also want a card that will allow me to playback from my computer thru my choice of either my TV or monitor. I want to be able to do this so that I can watch movies on TV that I have downloaded, and not have to first burn to CD's before I do it. Right now, it is very time consuming to d/l a movie then have to spend the time to re-encode it into a different format so I can then burn it as SVCD, and then finally watch it on my stand alone DVD player.

From what I understand, in order to do this, I would have to have a TV-in/TV-out card. The only problem is that the only way I have been able to find a TV out card is by getting one that is built into a video card. I don't really need another video card.

My reason for wanting the TV out ability is so that I can watch movies on my TV and my whole family can watch them at the same time. It does not work very well when you have 5 people sitting around a 17" monitor at the same time and trying to watch a movie.

I like the LeadTek WinFast2000, but from what I understand, it is only a TV in card and will not do TV out.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[boatboy63]

Anyone?

[vhelp]

boatboy63,

I'll be real quick.

Anyways, an inexpensive card is the one I have $79 approx year ago:
* ATIRFP (rage fury pro agp)
* comes w/ MMC 7.1 (works well, w/out any problems out of the box)
* can capture in real-time, to MPEG1/2
* can capture in AVI format w/ various codecs, ie huffy; pic mjpeg, etc.
* has TV out (not all that worth it, but is their if you want it)
* but, takes a while to figure out on some pcs and each's limited video
knowledge.

Caution:
based on my expeirence, if you are captuirng via VHS, their may be noise
in the capture. This will depend on a few things like your motherboard
and VCR and other external issues that I haven't quite nailed yet.

I recommend an AGP card cause it does help w/ less frame drops, where a pci
will slow things down a bit w/ some capture cards and motherboards.

DC10+ Card:
This one (IMO) is a winner. Makes good captures (based on your experience)
of just about every source materials. During captuirng, it somehow helps to
keep video stable (but i'm not sure on this yet)

Issues to work out for above cards (any cards) are:
* driver update (per motherboard, bios etc)
* software updates
* direct-X version use per OS and motherboard
* external sources ie, VCRs; Cable; Anttena; DVD etc.
* your understanding of all aspects of video processees
* headackes, and more headackes
* more

As always, there are issues w/ every PC setups.
that's it for me.
-vhelp