Using Your Computer As a TV via Tuner Card

A TV tuner card is a computer component that allows television signals to be received by a computer. Most TV tuners also function as video capture cards, allowing them to record television programs onto a hard disk.

Adding a hybrid tuner card to your computer allows you to receive the antenna broadcast from the antenna cable and the paid subscription satellite or cable input that can be received from their set top box output only.

FTA satellite receiver box output will work as well when using a hybrid or combo tuner card.

Note: Tuner cards only receive over the air broadcast with a direct connection. (Exception see ClearQAM below). All other satellite and cable TV feeds need a set top box to create the output to your TV tuner card. (Channels are changed using the set top box. The TV tuner card needs to be set to ch3 or ch4 just like the tuner in your current TV.) Additional features of each tuner card will be determined by the software that comes with the tuner card that is installed on your computer.

No set top boxes are needed for the following:

1. Local DTV over the air signals that your antenna receives.
ClearQAM : With a cable TV connection and a clearQAM capable TV tuner, you can receive and record the signal that comes through a standard coax cable feed, originating from your cable company. Most cable providers today will at least push a standard and hi-def version of the major networks (e.g. ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) as unencrypted QAM channels.
2. Satellite receiver cards that replace the need for the FTA satellite receiver box when installed on your PC. So for those only the dish feed can be directly feed into a satellite receiver card from the satellite dish. They aren't considered "TV tuner cards" they are "FTA satellite receiver cards" NOT for paid subscription services, only for use with FTA satellite. (Needs satellite dish setup)

There are currently four kinds of TV tuner cards on the market: Analog TV tuners - Avoid Analog only cards Cheaper models output a raw video stream, suitable for real-time viewing but ideally requiring some sort of compression if it is to be recorded. More expensive models encode the signal to Motion JPEG or MPEG, relieving the main CPU of this load. Many cards also have analog input (composite video or S-Video) and many also provide FM radio reception. Digital TV tuners Digital TV is broadcast as an MPEG-2 stream, so no encoder is necessary; instead, the digital cards either provide the whole MPEG transport stream or extract the individual (audio and video) elementary streams. Hybrid tuners A hybrid tuner has one tuner that can be configured to act as an analog tuner or a digital tuner. Switching in between the systems is fairly easy, but can not be done "on the fly". The card operates as a digital tuner or an analog tuner until reconfigured. Combo tuners This is similar to a hybrid tuner, except there are 2 separate tuners on the card. One can watch analog while recording digital, or vice versa. The card operated as an analog tuner and a digital tuner. The advantages over 2 separate cards are cost and utilization of expansion slots in the computer. As many regions around the world convert from analog to digital broadcasts, these tuners are gaining popularity. TV tuners are available in a number of different interfaces: as PCI-bus expansion card, PCIe (PCI Express) bus or USB devices. In addition, some video cards double as TV tuners, notably the ATI All-In-Wonder series. The card contains a receiver, tuner, demodulator, and an analog-to-digital converter for analog TV.

Variants Hauppauge WinTV TV tuner card A DVB-S2 tuner card D-Link external TV tuner

Like the analog cards, the Hybrid and Combo tuners can have specialized chips on the tuner card to perform the encoding, or leave this task to the CPU. The tuner cards with this 'hardware encoding' are generally thought of as being higher quality. The small USB tuner stick have become more popular in 2007 and 2008 and are expected to increase in popularity. These small tuners do not have hardware encoding due to the size constraints.

Many cards are limited to the radio frequencies and video formats used in the country of sale. However, many TV tuners used in computers use DSP, so a firmware upgrade is often all that's necessary to change the supported video format. Many newer TV tuners have flash memory big enough to hold the firmwares for decoding several different video formats, making it possible to use the tuner in many countries without having to flash the firmware.

Many TV tuners can function as FM radios: this is because there are similarities between broadcast television and FM radio. The FM radio spectrum is close to (or even inside) that used by VHF terrestrial TV broadcasts. And many broadcast television systems around the world use FM audio. So listening to an FM radio station is simply a case of configuring existing hardware.

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See our "TV Tuner Card Review and Links To Buy" in the Guides section.