[Tfug] Radio/TV cards?

[Harry McGregor]

On 9/28/12 9:37 PM, Bexley Hall wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking for hardware so I can receive 2 AM/FM radio stations
> and 2 broadcast (CATV or OTA) video channels.
>
> How these capabilities are distributed among the hardware is
> flexible.  E.g., 2 radio tuners on a PCI card, a TV tuner on
> some other card.  Or, radio+TV on a single card.  etc.
CATV may or may not work without a DTA or Cable Box, depending on if 
Cox/Comcast has decided to encrypt QAM channels.

I know comcast has dropped analog channels, and gone to DTAs, and I am 
rather sure Cox has a well.

The most "reliable" would be ATSC OTA.

Personally I like the HD HomeRun which is ethernet based, I may even be 
able to dig mine up for you to try.  We dropped CATV about 2 or 3 years 
ago, and I still have not been able to get time/will/$ to get a antenna 
put up on the top of our house mast (huge iron pipe that goes from 15 
feet above the roof all the way to the basement, no clue why....).

I also have some PCI capture cards, I will try and dig them all up this 
weekend.  Bug me via direct email Sunday or Monday

FM radio can be done by a lot of the cheap analog card, such as the BTTV 
based card.

AM radio gets more tricky, very few cards or devices capture it...

> Anyone with first-hand experience using anything like this?
> Or, pointers to "recommended" products?
>
> Also, any idea as to the approximate resource load that their
> uses entail?

ATSC and QAM are basically just moving bits, there is no encoding going 
on since it's already mpeg2.

Radio is very low utilization of course, since it's just audio.

-Harry
>
> Thx,
> --don
>
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