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TV Tuner Card Buying Guide

June 12, 2010 by Saqib 2 Comments

A TV Tuner card is very useful if someone wants to view TV on a Computer. Why purchase a new TV, when you can simply insert a TV Tuner card in a Computer and start enjoying Television. Now the main question arises is which one to buy ? Well, there are two types of TV Tuner cards available, Internal and External. So which one suits you best and which TV tuner card to buy is a million dollar question. Some people get confused here. Read this and know which one suits you the best.

Difference Between Internal and External TV Tuner Cards

  • Internal TV Tuner card

    Above you can see how an internal tv tuner card looks like. These are PCI based cards, which are inserted in a free PCI slot of motherboard. After inserting the card, you’ll need to install its driver and software which is provided in the CD. So now you can start enjoying the TV on the Computer. Some functionalities offered by internal TV tuner card are recording, scheduled recording, timeshift, snapshot capture, remote, FM radio, etc. The minus point of these tv tuner cars is that you’ll need to wait for the Windows to load and then start the software.
  • External TV Tuner card

    Above is a picture of external TV Tuner card. These are tv tuner which sit on the table, maybe beside monitor or speakers. You don’t need to insert them in the CPU. Just place it near monitor, connect all the wires to it and then just ON the adapter which came with that card and start enjoying the TV. You’ll need to connect the monitor’s cable to this TV Tuner first, and then it goes to the CPU. Other connections are speakers, adapter and TV cable. So connect all these and then you can start viewing TV without even loading Windows. This will also save the electricity, as the CPU doesn’t needs to be started to watch the TV. It also comes with remote, just like internal cards. The only minus point that I can see in external TV tuner cards is that you can’t record TV and capture snapshots. If you are thinking to buy this then look out for tv tuner card that has at least 1680 x 1050 resolution.

Now you know what’s the main difference between these two. If you are confused about which one to buy then ask yourself, do you want to record TV, capture snapshots, if yes then go for internal TV tuner card and if you think that you won’t be recording TV and don’t want to wait for Windows to load everytime then go for external one. Its that simple. Hope this clears out your buying dilemma.

Related: Difference between LCD and LED

Filed Under: Hardware

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ashish Sainik says

    November 1, 2011 at 9:53 pm

    Very helpful indeed.

    Reply
  2. Carlton says

    June 15, 2010 at 7:29 am

    If I were to choose between the 2, I’d go for external tv tuner cards since I don’t have to experience the hassle of installing the hardware on my CPU.

    Oh! and it’s a great post.

    Reply

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