Download Free TV Tuner / Capture Card Drivers

Description

A TV tuner card is a kind of television tuner that allows television signals to be received by a computer. Most TV tuners also function as video capture cards, allowing them to record television programs onto a hard disk much like the digital video recorder (DVR) does.

The interfaces for TV tuner cards are most commonly either PCI bus expansion card or the newer PCI Express (PCIe) bus for many modern cards, but PCMCIA, ExpressCard, or USB devices also exist. In addition, some video cards double as TV tuners, notably the ATI All-In-Wonder series. The card contains a tuner and an analog-to-digital converter (collectively known as the analog front end) along with demodulation and interface logic. Some lower-end cards lack an onboard processor and, like a Winmodem, rely on the system's CPU for demodulation.

There are currently four kinds of tuner card on the market:

Analog television cards output a raw video stream, suitable for real-time viewing but ideally requiring some sort of video compression if it is to be recorded. More advanced TV tuners encode the signal to Motion JPEG or MPEG, relieving the main CPU of this load. Some cards also have analog input (composite video or S-Video) and many also provide a tuner (radio).

This is similar to a hybrid tuner, except there are two separate tuners on the card. One can watch analog while recording digital, or vice versa. The card operates as an analog tuner and a digital tuner simultaneously. The advantages over two separate cards are cost and utilization of expansion slots in the computer. As many regions around the world convert from analog to digital broadcasts, these tuners are gaining popularity.

Like the analog cards, the Hybrid and Combo tuners can have specialized chips on the tuner card to perform the encoding, or leave this task to the CPU. The tuner cards with this 'hardware encoding' are generally thought of as being higher quality. Small USB tuner sticks have become more popular in 2006 and 2007 and are expected to increase in popularity. These small tuners generally do not have hardware encoding due to size and heat constraints.

While most TV tuners are limited to the radio frequencies and video formats used in the country of sale, many TV tuners used in computers use DSP, so a firmware upgrade is often all that's necessary to change the supported video format. Many newer TV tuners have flash memory big enough to hold the firmware sets for decoding several different video formats, making it possible to use the tuner in many countries without having to flash the firmware. However, while it is generally possible to flash a card from one analog format to another due to the similarities, it is generally not possible to flash a card from one digital format to another due to differences in decode logic necessary.

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