what are min requirements for TV capture card

[JebusRocks]

Hello all
I am interested in buying a low end(cheap) TV tuner card. I currently have one now that works but does not allow me to 'record' video ie TV shows, an option that I want.

So in general terms what is the min requirements for a TV card that would allow me to do this? I have no interest in video editing or burning straight to DVD. I simply want to use my computer to record/save TV shows to my HDD for future viewing.

Currently I have a 1 ghz AMD and 512 mb ram.

I am looking at a WinFast TV2000 XP Expert card with out remote for 49$(cdn) and thoughts on this card?

 

[felixc]

This card had no MPEG encoder on-board. I doubt that your system will have enough bandwidth to make decent recordings. A one gig CPU can barely keep up playing good quality video without hardware acceleration on the graphics card. Encoding is much more CPU intensive. Try to find one that has an integrated MPEG encoder. Hauppage makes some, but there may be cheaper ones elsewhere, as a new generation of encoder chips has arrived on the market lately.

 

[JebusRocks]

Thanks for the info felixc I will do some more investagation before buying.