Wide World of Women

Hi...I am still capping with an older analog tv video capture card. I'd like to move into 2009 and get an HD Tv video capture card...are there any that aren't too expensive? I am running an older computer too...Pentium 4 - 1.7 GHZ with 1 gig of ram...and XP sp2... any ideas guys??

Thanks in advance

Which bus are you running, PCI, AGP, or PCI Express? Your computer may be at the low end of the resources needed for an HD card. You may have to upgrade the RAM and/or your power supply. Try searching on Newegg or Tiger Direct for those cards.

If you have a cable or fios box or dvr, you could try to cap the unflagged channels through firewire.

HD tuner cards will only receive OTA and QAM which is basically limited to you locals. I'll let you know right now with the digital transition, a lot of broadcast stations have changed from UHF to VHF which has made indoor antennas almost useless. I wouldn't recommend getting a tuner unless you have cable or fios QAM. Either that or a rooftop antenna that you have verified works with a TV tuner. The only way I got signal from VHF channels with my indoor antenna was sticking it out arms length outside a 2nd story window. So recording OTA for the newer VHF channels is pretty much done for me.

Hauppauge HD PVR can record from any source with component inputs, but I doubt you would be able to playback the h.264 smoothly with a P4. Maybe you could get some stills from it, but playing the video right would be pushing it.

Read this at AVS forum and see if you can narrow it down to what you want to try out. If you have any specific questions after that you can post here, and I'm sure someone will try to help you out.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1061644

This is something you may not want to hear, but if you want to do that you should probably look into getting another computer. It could probably do it, but you would work your computer to death doing it. Tiger is always running specials, you could get on their mailing list. I get them like two or three times a day with some decent deals. You just need know what you want your computer to do. In other words, dont get all the bells and whistles if you dont need them. It would suprise you how many people will buy a computer with say a 5.1 sound card and surround sound speakers and say they only use the computer for surfing the net