Need help on buying a good TV card for PC

Hi, i was just wondering if any tech can help me out here... im thinking of gettin a tv card for PC and i want to record cable tv programs with it ... there r many brands out there and alot of terms they use r quite new to me ... eg like the name of the chips they use on the card and that ... and the functions ... I want to use the card to watch free to air TV, Cable TV and have high resolution support (not sure if theres any card support HDTV?) have Video/Audio in to plugin consoles like PS2... basically i want one which can capture clips that i can convert into divx/vcd/dvd later... i had a brief look at these ones Leadtek and also a couple of pixelview ones and im pretty confused ... Leadtek offer really high res ... sounds quite good ... pixelview have afew different cards ... i need some comments and other brands to compare with .. if any pro out there that uses capture cards alot to record clips i need ur help and recommandations :) Cheers ;)

you should read through some posts in the 'capturing video' forum. -fisix

I think it depends on how much time you want to put into it and what expertise you have. The Creative Labs VCR card is an easy starting point which has decent quality, tivo-like time shifting functions and recording. But it records in its own proprietary file-system/format that is not strictly speaking MPEG2, and I have read that a lot of people have serious difficulty exporting this to MPEG2 (in order to convert to VCD, SVCD, Divx, or anything else) with the utility that comes with the card and cannot get the audio and video to sync well without a lot of effort (if at all). (note, this is only a problem for archiving, not watching the video or TV through the application that comes with the card). So you can watch, record and play back with this card but it's not great for archiving in standard formats. If you don't go for that, I suggest you get a BT848 or BT878 (Brooktree) based card (Hauppauge makes some really decent and cheap ones) that you can use DScaler with and that VirtualDub (an awesome capture program) can support. Then it's really the power of your computer and the amount of time and expertise you will put into it that matter. Finally, Hauppauge and others make HDTV compatible cards but they are much more expensive. I suggest you get a cheap ($50 to $100 as described above) card first to see if you will really enjoy the capture - encode - archive process before you blow big bucks on technology you decide is too much of a hassle to use.

I think it depends on how much time you want to put into it and what expertise you have. The Creative Labs VCR card is an easy starting point which has decent quality, tivo-like time shifting functions and recording. But it records in its own proprietary file-system/format that is not strictly speaking MPEG2, and I have read that a lot of people have serious difficulty exporting this to MPEG2 (in order to convert to VCD, SVCD, Divx, or anything else) with the utility that comes with the card and cannot get the audio and video to sync well without a lot of effort (if at all). (note, this is only a problem for archiving, not watching the video or TV through the application that comes with the card). So you can watch, record and play back with this card but it's not great for archiving in standard formats. If you don't go for that, I suggest you get a BT848 or BT878 (Brooktree) based card (Hauppauge makes some really decent and cheap ones) that you can use DScaler with and that VirtualDub (an awesome capture program) can support. Then it's really the power of your computer and the amount of time and expertise you will put into it that matter. Finally, Hauppauge and others make HDTV compatible cards but they are much more expensive. I suggest you get a cheap ($50 to $100 as described above) card first to see if you will really enjoy the capture - encode - archive process before you blow big bucks on technology you decide is too much of a hassle to use.