Watching Real HDTV On My Computer

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Recently I was having a battle with myself about whether to buy a small HDTV for my den or just put a HDTV card into one of the computers there. The great thing about having a battle with yourself is that you always win. The den is the room where I do all my writing when I am at home. The main computer has two monitors attached to it. It is an AMD quad and quite capable. The monitors have 22 and 24 inch wide screens. It isn't that I would watch tv in there every day, but there are times when I want to grab a show and the other two tvs are being watched. It just so happens that my home is sometimes very busy. There are only three people living in it, but there are times when my kids stay over with the grandchildren for a few days. They like to watch their kiddie shows, which I watch with them most ofthe time, but there are those times when I want to catch a sporting event like an hockey game, but I don't want to deprive them of their shows.

I have been thinking about what to do for awhile now. I had the idea of mounting a 26 inch hdtv on the wall, but my wall is very unusual. The wall is covered with a very special mural that is a huge photograph of the Columbia space shuttle. The mural is about 12 feet wide. I didn't want to cover that, but it is the best wall in the room to mount a tv. The walls on the sides consist of one outside wall, which is no good for mounting anything and the other side is a wall that has things like break fronts, and special pictures hanging from it. One of the pictures is a collage that is nicely framed of Muhammad Ali's greatest fights, it was won by my son in a raffle and given to me. He knew that I always admired Ali for his fighting skills. That only left one other wall and that too was an outside wall. Since 3/4ths of one wall is taken up with my computer setup and ½ of another wall has a computer setup and then a third wall has my wife's computer setup, there is no more room for tv stand.

After thinking about this problem for awhile, it pretty much decided itself. The HDTV card was the best way to go, I just hope that my monitors are good enough. It turns out that there are a lot of HDTV cards on the market. Not only that, but they come in different flavors. Some have one tuner, others have two. Some go into the PCI Express slot and some are just PCI. Some only get their signal from an antenna and if you have cable watch out, it won't work on all, but it will work on some of these types, if you have a cable box hooked up to the tv. I still had a lot of thinking to do. I saw a cheap card, that was so cheap that I couldn't believe it. It was around $20.00, but from a company that I never heard of. I started reading reviews on it and there was a catch. The card only scanned for a limited number of channels and people were complaining that while it did receive cable programming, for some reason it wasn't able to get HDTV, the very thing that people were buying it for.

Ever since I purchased my Dreamweaver software from a site that turned out to be selling stolen serial numbers, I have been very careful where I buy from. By the way, that was when Adobe graciously gave me a copy for free. Anyway I decided to look around at all the different cards and read the reviews on them. The prices seem to range from that $20.00 card to a couple of hundred dollars. Some of the cards allow you to hook up other devices to them like DVD recorders of the type you would use with a television not a computer. I really didn't see the point to this. Other cards with two tuners had picture in picture. I found out long ago that this is something I had absolutely no use for. I have always felt that you need sound on both channels as confusing as that might be, so a picture in picture capable card meant nothing to me.

I looked at some of the higher end cards and there seems to be quite a few good ones out there, but of course your monitor has to be able to handle High Definition. After a long decision period I finally settled on the VisionTek TV Wonder 650 Combo. It a PCIe card that fits into the PCI Express slot allowing a lot faster transmission of data. The combo pack comes with a remote and several other things. I then searched for the cheapest price, but that was from an unheard of source and even though it was $69 with free shipping I was afraid to take the chance. I went for the item at Newegg, which usually has pretty good prices. The item sells for as high as $139 in some places so I paid the Newegg price of $89 plus shipping, knowing that it could be returned if needed and that I would actually get what I ordered.

One important thing that I had to do before I ordered the tv card was to make sure that I had the slot in the computer for it. I opened the case and there were 3 empty PCIe slots. One was blocked by a board, but the other two were ready to be used, so that should not be a problem. It is important to remember that you should check and see if you have room to install a board and have the proper slot before you buy it. I also had to check and make sure it ran on my operating system which is WindowsXP. I refused to ever use Vista on anything I own since it is slower than XP and also prevents some hardware from running that I have. I already have a cable box, so I am not worried about getting all the channels as I will plug in the cable from that box into the card.

All in all, I am excited about this purchase and can't wait to receive it. I have had tv cards before, but never a HDTV card. The last one I had was a USB card that gave me all sorts of trouble. I uninstalled it and was never able to get it running again. Not many pieces of software recognized this tv card. I found this out the hard way.