Thursday, September 22, 2011

Watch TV Shows On Computer

By Danny Sinclair


With our world slowly being dominated by computers and hi-tech gadgets, watching television shows on desktop or laptop computers is not that surprising anymore. In fact, the many technological advances today have made it possible for us to watch TV shows on computer. You may wonder how it's done. Well, read on and find out how.

One device that is particularly useful in watching TV from your PC is the TV tuner card. A TV tuner card is a kind of television tuner that enables desktop or laptop computers to receive television signals. A tuner card may come in the form of an internal PCI card or an external USB box. In addition, it may be of the digital or the analog type.

The digital type of TV tuner cards is able to broadcast the program in the popular MPEG2 format. This, in turn, eliminates the need for any encoder. It can also choose to broadcast the program as a whole or as separate audio and video files. In addition, digital tuners can rewind or fast forward the program depending on what the users want. Some even permit the users to divide the computer screen so that they can watch more than one program all at the same time.

In contrast to digital tuner cards, analog tuner cards output a raw video stream in such a way that it can be viewed real time. The problem with this, however, is that some sort of compression is ideally required if the video is to be recorded. Naturally, the analog type is cheaper as compared to digital TV tuners. But as mentioned, analog TV tuner cards cannot broadcast the program in the JPEG motion or MPEG format. Moreover, unlike digital tuners that do not need any form of compression, analog TV tuners do not relieve the CPU from any load.

But if you want both an analog and digital tuner card, then you can opt for the hybrid type. This type of tuner can be configured to act as both an analog and a digital tuner card. The problem with this, though, is that switching between the systems cannot be done immediately. As mentioned previously, you have to reconfigure the device in some way in order for it to operate either as a digital tuner or an analog tuner.

This, now, is how to watch TV shows on computer - through the use of TV tuner cards!




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