How to Watch TV Programs on your Computer_367

How to Watch TV Programs on your Computer Introduction

There are two ways that you can watch TV on your computer:

Watch TV from conventional broadcasts: cable, satellite, etc. Watch TV from websites like Hulu Hp Pavilion Dv6500 Battery, Joost, etc.

The first option requires a TV card on your computer and the second one requires nothing more than a fast Internet connection, which is possibly one Megabits/second or higher. If you have both, you can go with the either one depending on what you want to watch; having one does not have any effect on the other.

If you do not have a TV card already, choosing the right one may be a little bit tricky. But as a Bright Hub reader you will be armed with cheap the necessary knowledge when you finish reading the article.

Choosing the Right TV Card

Choosing the right TV Card first depends on where you are and what type of replacement broadcast you are receiving. If you have only an analog broadcast, then you can use only a card that handles analog connection. If you have both analog and digital broadcasts, then you have shop to go with the card that supports both (called hybrid cards). In United States Ibm Thinkpad T500 Battery, there is no longer an analog broadcast as far as I know, so you will need to go with a digital TV Card. cheap

Second, the TV card should be capable of handling High Definition (HD) broadcasts, plus your computer should have the necessary computing power to display HD streams. I do charger not zxcsky09529 recommend going with HD streams if you have a relatively old computer. If you will use your computer to record TV streams (sooner or later you will) Hp Pavilion Dv9000 Adapter, make sure that you have a gateway capacious hard disk to record the TV shows.

Third, if you want to record HD streams and save them to your computer, then know in advance that encoding those streams require immense new computing power. For the analog broadcasts, the TV cards have MPEG-2 decoders on board Dell Inspiron 1520 Adapter, which requires minimal processing power, but this is currently not available in any card for store the HD streams. Therefore you will have to rely on your computer��s processing power.

Fourth, you may go for an internal card that is attached to an empty PCI slot on your compaq computer or an external one that uses the USB port, If you are a Linux user, I suggest you look for MythTV compliant TV Cards to avoid headaches in the future. The rest of this article is discount the same for Linux, the only changes are the programs you are using.

While you are choosing the TV card for your computer, I suggest you to check whether they are compliant with acer aspire Windows Media Center (MC). This way, you can watch TV inside your MC and avoid conflicts between the MC and the TV card��s software.

I also advise you to check if the card has zxcsky09520 a remote controller included in the box. Spend a few dollars more and ask for the one which has a remote controller. The separate remotes are priced higher than the TV cards themselves