Interesting Facts About TV Tuners

TV tuners offer people an alternative entertainment system right from their computers. This device is a great innovation for people using computers for very long hours to experience entertainment in the comfort of their rooms.

With the latest advancement in technology, computers are becoming sophisticated and capable of doing multi tasking applications. More features and capacities are developed over the years. Computers have become an entertainment system besides their normal functions. They are now capable of playing music and DVDs.

The recent development of a TV tuner card allows a computer to be used to watch Television. This computer part is an add-on card which permits television signals to be transmitted to the computer. It also functions as a video capture card capable of recording TV shows. The TV tuner is also able to record videos coming from external video players such as VHS players and video camera. This is possible through its auxiliary connector which is hooked up into the hard drive.

Some models of TV tuners come with an FM radio capability as well. This was made possible since television signal and radio signals are almost the same in frequency. In order to have the best reception, the TV tuner has a connector which you can attach to an external or internal antenna. A CD containing the driver and software used to configure the tuner is provided for this card as well. Some manufacturers even offer software which can be used to capture and edit videos stored in the computer.

These devices come in different interfaces such as:
• PCI Express bus (PCIe)
• PCI bus expansion card
• USB interface
There are also video cards that can be applied as TV tuner. The most popular among these cards is the ATI Series.

Below are the different types of TV tuners currently available in the market:
Analog TV Tuners
These types of cards are the cheapest in the market. They are ideal for real time viewing but requires compression if you have to record because it outputs a raw video stream. They usually have S-Video and FM radio capability.

Digital TV Tuners
Digital TV tuners can produce MPEG-2 video formats and there is no need to re-encode it. They are capable of providing an MPEG transport stream which extracts the audio and video.

Hybrid TV Tuners
This type of tuner has the competence of an analog tuner and digital tuner. This is done through the bundled software utilized to configure it.

Combo TV Tuners
This is almost the same as the hybrid tuner. The only difference is that this type of tuner is composed of two separate tuners on one card. It can operate as an analog and a digital tuner. These tuners gained its popularity because many countries around the world are changing from analog to digital broadcast.

Some of the latest tuners are equipped with a specialized chip which performs the encoding. This relieves the CPU from any workload as opposed to cheap models. Tuner cards with hardware encoding produces high quality videos. They too come with remote controls which can be used to play or pause and with built in memory for storing your favorite channel.

Another innovation in tuner card industry is the introduction of USB TV tuners. These tuners do not include a hardware encoding because of its limited size and heat issues. These devices are commonly used for notebooks because of its portability. Since TV tuners have limited radio frequencies and video formats, many of these employ DSP so it would be easy to upgrade the firmware in order to support other video format. As a result, newer models feature large capacity flash memory cards that are sufficient space to store firmware.

Having a TV tuner on a desktop computer or a laptop has become a trend in the world of daily computing. Many people are more into watching TV in their computers rather than on a traditional TV set. It had been a necessity for people on the go to watch TV right in front of their laptops. Plus the ability to play FM radio is a factor which made it a favorite tool for entertainment. In addition, due to the high cost of dedicated video capture cards, these TV tuners have been an alternative device for small time video editing shops. It is because they can produce high quality videos essential for video editing businesses.