OT - Watching TV on PC

yirm wrote on 9/2/2003, 1:02 AM
Okay, so I have this old "AV" Mac that I used for nothing but testing websites and watching TV. But I just moved, and my new office is teeny tiny, and I'm not setting up the Mac. But I still want to watch TV. So I've got cable, a VCR and a 1394 camcorder which does passthrough. If I wanted I could use Vegas' VidCap to watch (or ignore) TV while I work. But this is a lot of program to load for such simple, background task.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any kind of program that will let me watch TV on my computer through Firewire as described above.

TIA!

-Jeremy

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 9/2/2003, 1:19 AM
You could try Scenalyzer. However, I have never found and Firewire capture app that could give you a full screen without stuttering audio or video (and I have a 2.8 GHz machine).
yirm wrote on 9/2/2003, 1:25 AM
Actually, I'm not interested in full screen. So I'll check it out. Or maybe I'll just use Vegas' Vidcap.

Thanks.

-Jeremy
Chienworks wrote on 9/2/2003, 7:15 AM
If your goal is to watch TV in a small window then you'd probably be better off getting one of the video cards with analog input built in. ATI and Matrox both make these as do many others. Some are as cheap as $40. WinTV also makes some add-on cards that support just the TV input; their GO card probably sells for $25.

The reason i suggest this is that a video capture application is going to drag down a lot of your processor's horsepower and slow your system down quite a bit. Most of these cards do all the processing in hardware and use the overlay layer so they have very minimal impact on system performance.
yirm wrote on 9/2/2003, 2:35 PM
Chienworks, once again, you're probably right on the money. I used to have a Millennium G200 with Rainbow Runner G200. But now I've got the G550, and I don't think I can hook RRG200 to the G550. And even if I can, I don't think they have XP drivers, though Win2K driver would probably work. I'll figure something out. Thanks.

-jf