🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <17270017@hpgrla.gr.hp.com> galenr@hpgrla.gr.hp.com (Galen Raben) writes:
>Levi,
>Information on Windows-TV cards is a bit hard to come by, I've been trying
>for awhile now (without much success)...  Here's what little I have on the
>Hauppage card, yes it has a built-in 122 ch tuner, most the others I've heard
>of the tuner is an add-on (including VideoBlaster, CompuAdd's card, earlier
>New Media Graphics cards- dunno anything about the newer one(s)).
[stuff deleted]

I did a good deal of research on this and you're right - the info is hard to
come by.  Most of the info came from helpful netters who own of the cards. I
finally settled on Desktop TV.  It doesn't have nearly as many features as
Win-TV, but was ironically the best choice.  It will run in Windows, but only
in full screen, you can listen to the audio while not viewing it and when you
hear something interesting can just click on an app button and view the screen.
You can control volume, channel, favorite channels, last channel, brightness,
contrast, muting, hue, color, and I believe that's all, either while you're
viewing it full screen, or while you're just in Windows and listening to it.
There's no video capture, just a mono audio output (it comes with a small
speaker), and one video input - for cable, antenna, VCR, etc.  So why did I
opt for this?  Well of the other boards that I looked at there were various
problems.  The Video Blaster requires an additional tuner, New Media Graphics'
"Watchit" will only run in Windows at 640x480, which is useless to me.
Haupage's card came the closest.  It's supposed to run in all Windows
resolution modes.  However, it, along with the others (except for Desktop
TV) requires your VGA card to have a feature connecter.  Aparently most do,
but the ATI Graphics Ultras (bothe the old ones and new ones) don't.  In
addition, a netter who said he was the "not very happy owner of a Win-TV,"
told me that with his ATI Graphics Vantage, Win-TV could not handle his
card's 87hz refresh rate in 800x600 or 1024x768 - thus negating your ability
to use it with (or upgrade any time in the future to) a fast video card.
Aside from all of this, Desktop TV was one of the most reasonable in price -
I paid $250 at Micro Warehouse.  Hope this helps.


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_______________________________________________________________________
|Levi Wallach                           lw2c@faraday.clas.virginia.edu|
|University of Virginia                                               |
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