First, The TV

There are two types of TV: old, yucky TV, and new shiny HDTV. Unfortunately, we still have to deal with old, yucky TV for a couple more years, so it’s a basic requirement of the tuner card. In addition to the yucky old analog TV, the tuner I chose had to support HDTV broadcasts, otherwise there wouldn’t be much point to having a big screen unit.

Being a big fan of Wikipedia, I started there. It has articles on virtually every topic involved in this project as well as extremely valuable pointers to existing guidelines. Of course this has been done before, and I could probably go over to the nearest MythTV HOWTO or Windows Media PC selection guide and let them do the work for me. But following someone else’s formula is just not in my nature. So like all good engineering projects, this one deserved over-thinking and lots of time-consuming internet research. My boss would call this type of research a “trade survey.” I call it “fun.”

So like most always, I started directly with the source of all knowledge. This article on TV tuner cards lists about a dozen manufacturers of hardware. Each of them has a bunch of products and variants. Firing up a spreadsheet, I started typing names and options into a big matrix. After about 20 minutes of that, I realized I’d be typing for a long, long time if I wanted to do anything that even resembled a comprehensive comparison.

Weighing the Options

I'd typed in far too much stuff and was remembering why engineers hate typing stuff in. So I started focusing on features that I really want. Then I realized that I'm not really sure what features I actually want. “Simple,” I told myself, “All of them.” Again, this held the simple elegance of my requirements list. So I headed straight to the professional sites. After all, why settle for the self explanatory WinTV, when you can have this bad boy?[2]

A note at the site claims that it’s, “The most powerful video and audio capture and preprocessing available.” Well, with all due respect to Digital Rapids, this time I don't have the backing of a multi-million dollar departmental skunk works budget and a team of software engineers to write code for me.

Time For Some Compromise

So, somewhat depressed, at not being a multi-million dollar corporate skunk works team, the guiding principle of my search switched from “include several kitchen sinks” to “compromise.” After all, I wasn't designing a holodeck. I was putting together a platform to support watching TV and blasting zombies. So let’s break down what I really need the box to do rather than my preferred choice of every possible audio/video signal. First, the unit has to be able to capture TV signals in the US, because that's where I live.

1. NTSC video capture.

Also, looking ahead, I see that Congress has decided that in a few short years, there will be no regular TV broadcasts, so the card must also support HDTV capture.

1. HDTV video capture.

And that’s about it, unless you start throwing in selection criteria like, “must support Linux,” or “must be compatible with cable systems.” So let’s throw it in:

1. Must support Linux or (Windows XP/Vista, if I'm left with no civilized choices).
2. Must support QAM 64 and QAM 256.

NTSC and HDTV broadcasts are fundamentally different. HDTV signals are already digital after you strip the pesky RF modulation off. This means that once the card has the signal decoded, it's already in a format ready to save to disk. Not so with regular TV signals.

Old-fashioned TV is broadcast in analog, meaning that the card has to convert it to digital. This function is known as “video capture” or “frame grabbing,” depending on which product spec you’re looking at. Frame grabbers can also snag video from regular component inputs as well as from the original RF demodulator.

So now it's nice to consider what other, non-RF interfaces the card supports.

1. Must support component video capture. This option is crucial to capturing movies from zombie blasting sessions as well as plugging in ancient devices like VCRs.

The interface is key to building out your media server. Although this article started out as an exploration of what is available in TV tuner cards for stand-alone PCs, many products are only available as USB sticks.

Additionally, many graphics cards manufacturers are including TV capture functions as part of a graphics board, thus combining both the input and the output capabilities.

1. PCI card format.
2. Stand-alone tuner unit.

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