best TV tuner available best bang/buck?

[BrokenKingdom]

Hey everyone this is my firsth time visiting this area of the forums.

I have a question about a TV tuner. I'm assuming a tuner allows you to connect a coaxial cable from an outside source to your PC. I just want to be sure I have this right.

With a TV tuner I can:

Watch cable on my pc
Hook up a dvd player to my pc
hook up gaming consols to my pc

is that about right?

And if so whats the best bang for the buck tuner I can buy?

Thanks for all the help ahead of time!

[RJ]

I'm assuming a tuner allows you to connect a coaxial cable from an outside source to your PC. I just want to be sure I have this right.

Almost correct. One very important thing to mention: There is no TV card out there that can handle all existing outside sources, so you need to look for a TV card that can handle your type of reception.

Watch cable on my pc

Yes, if you get a TV card for cable.

Hook up a dvd player to my pc

Yes, if your TV card has analog inputs. Though there is no sense in doing it, a better solution would be a DVD-ROM drive. Hooking up a DVD player to a TV card results in a noticeable quality loss.

hook up gaming consols to my pc

Yes. But you have to make sure that you don't get a TV card with MPEG-2 encoding chip. Some of them are wired the way that the MPEG-2 encoder is used for the analog inputs as well, which results in a lag of a few seconds, which is of course unacceptable if you play with a console.
For hooking up a console to the tv card, you need a simple card, without mpeg-2 encoder.

RJ

[BrokenKingdom]

Thanks for the reply, I'm really only looking for a solution to watch cable on my PC the other stuff I was more or less just curious about.

I have absolutly no idea what cards are good for just watching cable haha Any suggestions?