Add a TV tuner to your PC

I made a mistake in my review of HP TouchSmart IQ500 last week. I wrote that the demo unit I had did not have an integrated TV tuner. Actually, it does.
But it was not set up when I was doing my testing. It did not show in the computer’s TouchSmart application. A few hours after I submitted my article to the editor, I grew curious. It did not make sense that a full-featured PC such as the IQ500 did not have built-in such a small component.
So I continued my investigation. There it was. It was accessible through Windows Media Center. But by then it was too late to revise the article. Please accept my apology, folks.
Driven by my curiosity, I connected it to my FirstMedia coaxial cable to the port inside the drawer and began to set it up in Windows Media Center. The process actually created a list of the TV channel signals that it detected. I got 17 channels altogether. However, as no station data was available, the TV tuner only displayed the channel numbers from 1 to 17. I had no clue which one was MetroTV, which one was SCTV, etc.
To go up or down one channel, we can use the remote control (now I understand why the remote control is so crowded with buttons). Another way of doing it is to press the plus and minus buttons on the numeric keypad.
We can also freeze the broadcast, something that not every TV set can do. A clock above the time line bar will tell us exactly at what time we pause the TV program. The clock will resume the moment we press the play button.
Perhaps one of the most valuable benefits of having a TV tuner on our PC is the ability to record a program to be played back at a later time. It allows us to record the current, increasingly awry presidential debates, for example. Or, as in my case, it would let me record science reports that I can watch again and again.
The recording session can be done manually. To start it, we need to click with the mouse right button anywhere on the screen. A menu will pop up on the bottom right corner. We can click on the Record menu at the beginning of the program that we want to save, and press the Stop Recording menu item. We can also let the PC start and stop the recording automatically. So, when the children ask you to go to the mall, you will no longer worry that you will miss the long-awaited soccer match.
If you already have a PC, you can add the tuner. There are dozens of them to choose from. Some of them, such as ATI TV Wonder and Hauppage WinTV, come as a PCI card. They will require you to open the CPU casing and insert it into one of the free expansion slots. If you do not have any empty PCI slot, you can choose a USB-based such as Sling Media Slingshot SOLO and Diamond Xtreme TV PVR600. Of course, the USB model is easier to install and has the flexibility to be moved from one PC to another, even to a notebook or netbook.

The TV tuner, such as the one that the IQ500 has, still handles analog signal. In places where digital TV is the only choice, a set-top box will be required. In time, as the infrastructure improves, we will be able to enjoy the “triple play”. It combines entertainment and other types of content through a single broadband pipe — whether wired or wireless — into our home. Then it will be a different ballgame.

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Add a TV tuner to your PC