How To Get The Best From Your TV Tuner Card
TV Tuner
TV tuner cards give you the ability to watch TV channels which are broadcast over the terrestrial system on your PC. This can be extremely useful to you if you have a good quality PC monitor as part of a high end system, and you don’t want to go to the expense of having a dedicated television system installed. As well as the ability to watch television, the card also gives you the ability to record the broadcasts on the computer’s internal hard drive.
This can be a very important reason for buying the card, especially if you are trying to build up an archive of broadcast television which can be easily stored, and easily accessed in good quality. The alternatives are not cheap, and they all have serious limitations. The most traditional and long established way of storing television broadcasts, VHS tape, does not give a very high quality result, and the tapes themselves are extremely fragile. Many people are now transferring their old archived VHS material to digital systems, and that is a very sensible course of action to take.
There are many ways to record broadcast television directly in digital format, whether using a hard disk drive similar to the one you find in your computer, or external DVD disks. The equipment you need to be able to do this is not cheap, and much of it has limitations. DVD systems come in three different formats, and the best of these by far, the DVD-RAM system, is not that well supported due to the cheapness of the inferior alternatives.
Hard disk recording systems are only designed for short term storage of television programs, what is usually referred to as “time-shifting”. They are extremely useful for recording programs which will be shown at a time you will not be there to watch them, and they can even be set to record multiple episodes of the same series without any further manual intervention. For permanent archiving, however, you will need another different system.
Using a TV tuner and your home computer for this makes perfect sense. The computer can easily function as a temporary recorder in much the same way that a dedicated TV recorder would do. The difference is that the archived material can be stored far more easily. There is no need to burn off a DVD, as you can just transfer the file to another place on your computer’s hard disk, or to an external disk. As the capacities of hard disk drives have increased to the level where a one terabyte disk can be had for around a hundred dollars, there is no real incentive to use any other form of storage. Your content will be easy to access, easy to back up, and easy to store and keep inventory of. This will allow you to get the very best from your TV tuner.
