Programs to watch TV from TV cards

The PCHDTV 3000 will record:

1) S-Video or composite video (but not component or DVI or DHMI). 2) NTSC (old-style, normal, American over-the-air analog TV).

3) ATSC (American over-the-air, digital TV).

4) QAM (American digital cable-TV unencryptedonly).

I'm guessing that your set-top-box has an S-Video output that you could record. If you've got digital or hi-res channels, the set-tob box will convert them to normal resolution analog S-Video.

If that's what you're going to do, just about any video capture card will work. If you want to go with a low-power CPU (fanless is a good thing), you may be better off with something like the Hauppage WinTV PVR-350 that does both MPEG2 encoding and decoding in hardware.

If you want to record HDTV in hi-def, your only option is to get a set-top box that has a firewire output that is enabled. Then all you need is a $10 firewire card.

You'll probably need something like an nVidia 5200 and a 2-3GHz CPU to get full-frame 1080i output. Quoting from the pchdtv web site:

How does cpu speed affect video quality? Decoding of HD streams requires more cpu power than decoding DVD streams because of the higher resolutions. If the cpu can not keep up, frames are dropped and motion does not appear smooth. With slower cpus we recommend video cards that support hardware accelerated mpeg decoding and the XvMC interface. Currently nVidia supports this in some of their video cards such as the MX series and FX4200 cards. Better deinterlacing can also be done on higher performance machines. We recommend systems with greater than 2.4GHz cpus to provide the greatest flexibility in the choice of video cards, deinterlacing algorithms and players with HD video streams. The MythTV project recommends a P4 3.0Ghz with Hyper Threading for smooth playback with their PVR software.

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