TV tuner?

A

ADWill9

New Member
Hey everyone!

I've got a spare XP desktop computer, which I'm hoping to use as our media pc, in our living room... share all our mp3's, check email on the TV, YouTube on tv, etc.

From what I've come to understand about TV tuners, you need a dedicated cable (coax) line, correct? We already have the maximum number of cable boxes in our house, so that wouldn't be an option. We have Comcast, basic digital cable (we get HBO, and a bunch of the 100/200 range channels, but no HD).

With that in mind, is it possible to split the coax cable (either before or after the cable box)?? It would be awesome to take advantage of TV tuner capablities (recording one show while watching another), but I'd be almost just as happy to use the computer as a VCR, basically...

Our TV has available component (not HD), s-video, and composite inputs, and the cable box has only composite out (other than coax, which goes to TV). If we can't split the coax cable, I assume we'll have to come out of the cable box with composite, in which case I wouldn't want to shell out a lot of cash for such a low-video-quality device......

Recommendations? Thoughts??
Thanks!

-ADW


PS To clarify, I'm not too concerned about using the computer as a tuner, per se, as much as I'd like to just record programs.
 
You can use a good cable splitter but also suffer the signal as a result when placing that before the box. The cable here sees a 3way splitter where instead of the tuner card a vcr takes over for tuning simply using the analog inputs for the time being.

The second goes to a tv set for all of the basic channels while the 3rd goes out to the box itself patched indirectly back through another vcr for recording movies while watching a basic channel. Most pc tuner card easily have their own PVR program in the software for them.
 
Considering we already have lousy standard def cable, I wouldn't be crazy about losing video quality, by splitting the cable. Are there any video cards that could accept a crummy composite video input... and still record TV programs?? Although in that case we'd need to connect audio via a different method, maybe splitting the cable is the only plausible solution.
 
One thing besides looking at the DVI in seen on the newer HD capable cards out is a separate rv tuner or video capture card and then putting a vcr or other device seeing analog inputs inline. You patch the vcr with it's own recorder to the pci card you add in. In other the tuner card is simple used as an input adapter.

For basic cable and analog camcorders I have a vcr setup here for either viewing taped shows, reports, or for patching video indirectly with an expansion card. Even with a good spltter and I mean "GOOD" splitter the cable installer provided you still see a half way decent picture. The additional cabling is the main hassle running that around more then anything else there.
 
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