TV Tuners: Kick Back and Watch PC
The impressive play and record features of the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 and ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 help make them our top choices for putting TV on your PC.
You don't have to buy a pricey Media Center PC or get a TiVo to record your favorite television shows. For as little as $89, you can outfit your PC with a TV tuner that will let you pause and rewind live TV and record shows to your hard drive.
TV tuners for the PC come in two flavors: PCI cards and external USB boxes. They make it a snap to watch full-screen, full-motion video on a monitor, or keep an eye on a show in a smaller window while surfing the Web. We tested two PCI cards (ADS Tech's $89 Instant TV +FM PCI and Hauppauge's $99 WinTV-PVR-150) and three USB devices (ATI's $124 TV Wonder USB 2.0 with optional remote control, AVerMedia's $99 UltraTV USB 300, and the $140 Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2). Both the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 and the ADS Tech come with an FM tuner and an antenna, but only the Hauppauge can receive FM signals via coaxial cable (assuming that your cable TV company provides the service). All of the devices have inputs for coaxial, composite, and S-Video cables. To test the tuners, we used live TV and coaxial inputs. All of them delivered acceptable video and audio: Though image quality varied a little, the differences were too slight to affect a buying decision. Still, the images might have been crisper if we had used a set-top box and connected via composite or, even better, S-Video. You can also use the composite and S-Video inputs to watch video from an external video source, such as a digital camcorder or a VCR.
Read "TV Tuners for your PC" to learn more.