Computer hardware

I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with a TV tuner for their computer. I was thinking about getting one but read that if you use your monitor to watch tv, the quality isn't as good since cable is designed to be viewed on a television. Do you know if I can run it in through my computer, and out to the tv with no loss of quality? The reason I ask is because I would love to be able to record tv shows digitally onto my computer instead of doing it on tapes. Then I could burn them all to DVDs and be set Anybody have any experience with them? Thanks.

- Joel

You sure can. I recommend getting the external USB TV Tuner from ATI so you can watch TV and not sacrifice a nice graphics card. Alternatively, you can get the ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 which includes a good 3D card with all the TV Tuner stuff built in.

I have an HDTV tuner with monitor outs. It works well with SD broadcasts (most cable) and has lots of inputs. However, video games look terrible on my monitor using it (not LCD ghosting either, PC games look great). TV looked perfect, so I"m not sure why it only affected video games through both the component in and RCA in. Whatever! This method doesn't let you record TV, so I guess it's not very helpful to you... but, oh well. My $0.02.