Recording TV on the Computer
Q. Is it possible to plug in a TV cable to my computer and use it like a VCR to record programs?
A. In most cases, you just need a TV tuner card for the computer and a program to do the recording. Some TV tuner cards are designed for installation inside the computer and some are external boxes that connect through a Mac or a PC’s U.S.B. port. Both provide the jacks to connect a coaxial cable or antenna to the computer so you can pipe in the programming.
Several companies sell TV cards, including Hauppauge (hauppauge.com) and AverMedia (www.aver.com/multimedia.html), and you can find many more around the Web. Some cards include their own recording software, but programs like SnapStream’s Beyond TV (www.snapstream.com) give TiVo-like powers to your Windows PC. You can also buy the Beyond TV software bundled with a compatible TV tuner card if you haven’t made the hardware purchase yet.
Some TV recording software includes onscreen program guides that let you easily select the shows you want to record, and a few can also handle high-definition content, so shop around. Extra features, like the ability to easily burn shows to DVD or export them to versions that play on a portable video player, are also becoming common.
ADS Technologies (www.adstech.com) has a number of internal and external TV recorders and Elgato Systems (www.elgato.com) offers the EyeTV 250, an external tuner box and recording software, for Macs running OS X.
If you plan to record a lot, you might want to consider adding an external hard drive to the mix to hold all of your programs, as high-quality video files can be rather large. For example, a guide on SnapStream’s site (www.snapstream.com/products/beyondtv/faq.asp) estimates that five hours of recorded video at the “good quality” MPEG-2 setting needs 10 gigabytes of space — and just one hour of HDTV can eat the same amount of hard drive real estate.
