TV cards

[judge john]

hi again,
i know absolutely nothing about TV cards and need to be informed. i am soon to go to university( if you aren’t in the UK you will probably know it as college) and i will only have a small room so a PC and TV will take up a lot of desk space. i wanted to know if it was possible to get terrestrial TV channels and others by using one of these cards. and if so how does it work, do you just plug the aerial in or what?
i was also wondering if you can buy a graphics card combined with a TV card? or are they completely different things?
so all i want to do it watch TV trough my PC monitor and nothing much more although a few other features would be an added bonus. i don't have to much money to spend, but i would want quite a good picture quality.

[SuperSparks]

Yes indeed, you can either get an analogue TV tuner card, or a digital one that will let you watch the freeview channels as well (that is probably a better one to go for). All you do is plug a TV aerial in and then you can watch TV on the monitor using the software supplied with the card. You can get PCI cards or USB external ones.

Hauppage do some good cards:

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/pages/prods.html

ATI used to make the "All in wonder" graphics card, which had a built in TV tuner, but I'm not sure if it's still available. Personally I wouldn't bother, it wasn't ever much of a graphics card, and was quite expensive and could only receive analogue TV.

[judge john]

cheers for the advise. i think i might get a WinTV-NOVA-T pci as it's a lot cheaper that the usb one. just hope the picture quality is good. i read on amazon that you also require a 10db tv amplifier so i'll have to get one of them.

[SuperSparks]

Yep, that looks like just what you need. Make sure that you can get Freeview where you are going though, it hasn't quite been rolled out to all areas yet.

www.freeview.co.uk