TV tuner cards... [was: RE: hey"!]

Ebay has a listing category JUST for TV tuner cards, so you know they always have a lot of em available. I use the Pinacle Studio Pro card. I have been using it to record cable TV shows, then later converting/compressing the HUGE files. You need to realize a few things though: 1) The file size is HUGE. My card saves the video as AVI, which is good, but I use Windows 98se, which has a 2Gig file size limit. And yes, that 2Gig limit per file is a big problem. Once the file is compressed, its nowhere near that big, but still it can be difficult to record a 2 hour movie since i hit the limit right about then. And when I hit the limit, poof, the file is worthless (gotta love windows, eh?). 2) The video capture resolution is very low (320x240). So its only capturing every other scan line, and its capturing only half the horizontal resolution in order to compensate. In other words, only about 1/4th of the video image data is being captured. 3) These cards really bang on the PCI bus. Dont plan on touching the computer or running any other applications while recording. if you do, the number of frames that are dropped will increase, and the video playback will then be very poor at the spots where you were running netscape or whatnot. 4) If you get a cheap card that supports video capture better than 320x240, you forgot to read the fine print. That better resolution is for grabbing a single frame only. There are expensive cards that supposedly can do 640x480, one of these days I might just plunk down a few hundred to find out... All in all, it is kinda fun to capture an hour of Enterprise, edit out the commercials and compress the remaining 45 minutes of video, then burn about 3 shows onto a CDrom... The data compressing part is where you wish you had a raid, and a very fast AMD processor. -Lawrence LeMay