[Zoom]

Aren't there PCI cards you can buy with cable inputs that let you watch TV on your Mac? FM radio would be a plus, too, but I'm mainly wanting cable.

Who makes the cards? What do they cost? How good are they? Is it full screen or in a little window?

[clifhirtle]

If you're hardcore about TV on a computer, save yourself the headache and buy a Windows machine. Unfortunately, TV on Mac is pretty weak market offering little to none of the great TiVO-like digital recording, full-screen, DolbyDigital-equipped capabilities of offerings on the Wintel side.

However, if you're determined to get TV on your Mac and don't need the high-end features of the Windows cards, you've got essentially 3 options for getting TV into your Mac: PCI, Firewire, USB - the latter being the least desireable option due to inability to playback the defacto 640x480, 30fps in the Firewire/PCI cards.

For PCI-based cards, check out ATI's XClaim TV series at:
http://www.ati.com/na/pages/products...new/index.html

or else a seemingly less-desireable option (due to lack of official OS X support) in Formac's PCI-based ProTV card. This card features both TV and FM reception and can capture at the full 30fps. More info at:
http://www.formac.com/html/shopforma...oducts_tvtuner

For Cube/iBook/Powerbook/iMac owners equipped with Firewire, you can also check out the pricey, but incredible Formac Studio device. Studio is predominantly targeted towards the DV editing crowd with its DVD-speed input/export connectivity, but also features a built-in NTSC TV and FM tuner. If you're prepared to shell out the ~$400 for the Studio, check it out at:
http://www.formac.com/html/shopforma...roducts_studio

For those more recreational/inexpensive looking Mac users, you can also utilize USB-based solutions such as those made by XClaim and Eskape Labs. Specifically, a USB-equippped version of the XClaim card is available from ATi at:
http://www.ati.com/na/pages/products...usb/index.html

Another company active in the TV on Mac market over USB is Eskape Labs. Eskape manufactures several products of varying capacities for video import/export, but if you're looking specifically at getting TV INTO your Mac you'll probably want to check out their MyTV lineup which you can see (along with their other products) at:
http://www.eskapelabs.com/products.htmlAnd of course there's also (as usual) some crazy mo-fo MacNNForumers hacking up some dusty Darwin code in order to get Wintel-based cards working on their Macs as well. If you're game form some serious coding, you can run a search in the forums for "TV on X" or something like that and you'll find out what they're up to as well.

But again... walking down the aisles at CompUSA and seeing all of the Wintel-based solutions for getting TV into, stored, exported, etc versus the (if you're lucky) one box for a USB-based MyTV card is pretty darn disappointing. As much as i'd like to believe watching TV on my "digital hub" is possible, the reality is that the Mac market has a way to go before we start seeing the potential for the great features now found on Wintel offerings (see Radeon All-in-Wonder, WinTV-PVR, etc for reference).

In either case, HTH. This topic comes up every now and they on the forums and it's good to have all the possible solutions layed out in one place.

- clif

[Zoom]

WOW! Excellent reply, clifhirtle! Thanks a ton!

I checked out these products and I'm sure one of these will fit the bill nicely. I liked the Formac card, actually. The ATi card is being discontinued, apparently, or replaced by a less-functional model.

How much space does video take? At full resolution, what's the size per minute (roughly)? Can I use this card to turn VHS tapes into QT movies? Will there be much loss?

[sadie]

Originally posted by Zoom:
<STRONG>How much space does video take? At full resolution, what's the size per minute (roughly)? Can I use this card to turn VHS tapes into QT movies? Will there be much loss?</STRONG>

It really depends what you do to it. In a "raw" format - usually some uncompressed sort of MPEG - they're huge, far bigger than you could viably use.

To keep them, you need to compress them. Again, this is something PCs have more software for. The format you choose depends on the software you can get, and who needs to see the movies after. The options are:

• MPEG, in various flavours, has very good compression quality, but with the emphasis on keeping the image and sound quality at larger sizes. Being the official standard, it's readable all over the place, but you'll have a hard time finding mac software to encode it.
• Quicktime has reasonable compression quality, but not everybody has it. For keeping on your mac, it's probably the simplest solution.
• [b]RealPlayer is similar quality, more popular with PCs, but I'm not sure if you can find a mac encoder. Plus it's prone to wierd pauses in the middle of the movie if you don't encode well.
• Windows Media sucks, but somebody would complain if i didn't mention it.
• If you really want to save space, and aren't too worried about audio quality, you could use some variety of DivX. It's a hybrid of different flavours of MPEG, which saves space on the audio by using MP3. It's fiddly to encode and play, especially on the mac, and there seems to be a blossoming of different versions of it. It also has no identifiable company behind it, just an open source effort.

Sorry i can't give more detail, but this isn't really my area - if any of you know specific software, let us know.

[Zoom]

I was hoping that you could "rip" the video as MPEG or QT, and then use iMovie to create a VCD if I wanted to save them. (What format does VCD use?) VCD's seem to have wide support in modern DVD players.

Can anyone verify this?

Are VCDs well supported on desktop systems? That is, if I have a PC or Mac with a DVD drive, should I be able to play a VCD?

I also wanted to know how much hard drive space you needed for, say, and hour-long TV show.

With a good video card, couldn't you use your Mac as a PVR?