I might get a TV tuner card for digitizing VHS tapes and using game consoles with my monitor. All I really need is a composite video input, but most people seem to buy these for the antenna input part, and most of the reviews I read address only the TV-tuning capabilities. So it's been difficult for me to tell how a card will work for my purposes. I've decided that this Hauppauge WinTV card would probably be what I want. I'm not sure though, and I thought someone here might be able to confirm that this is a good one or point me to something else.

In particular, I'm wondering if $50 is a reasonable price, and whether the recording/capture resolution depends on the rest of my computer's capability in addition to the card. It seems like it doesn't do hardware encoding, so my computer might not be able to do software encoding in realtime, but that shouldn't affect the ability to capture and display video in realtime, right?

I had an earlier Hauppage card. The card itself seemed fit for purpose, but the supplied software was pretty crude, and there was no API information available.

Not very helpful, but it's all I've got, sorry.

There's a free program called DScaler that seems to be able to at least do the viewing part, but I'm not sure about the recording. I'm also not sure if it supports this card. It's not on their list, but the list might not be up to date. I have Premiere Elements, which can capture video, so I think it would probably be able to see this card, and then I wouldn't need to use their software.

This was a while ago, but I thought I'd report my results. I ended up getting the Hauppauge card I mentioned above. It works well for recording digital TV, and it works okay for gaming. There is a small but noticeable lag even with the least laggy settings. I'm not really sure whether it's the card's fault or the rest of my computer. It's a 2.2Ghz Pentium Dual Core with 3GB of RAM, and I think it's the slowest speed RAM you can get. It doesn't have a graphics card other than the motherboard, which has GeForce 7050/610i.

No matter what just pushing that much video information around is going to screw you up, I tried hooking a PS2 through my computer to play a game, and playing it was fine, but when I tried to tee the video information to mencoder as well... haha like 300 ms of lag.

You try playing with blocksize? tee doesn't have any detailed options about buffering, but I think bash can control piping in that way.
In any case, I'd expect the lag to come from encoding, not copying.

no, because I was encoding using ffv1, my computer does around 270fps using ffv1 :P

orite.

So in other words, I shouldn't feel bad if I have a little lag. It's okay now, we have an LCD TV that does the job much better. I can still use the tv tuner card for converting VHS. I noticed that gamecube games look a lot better on the 40" TV than on the 19" computer monitor (through the tuner card). I think the software that displays the video from the card must have an inferior method of upscaling the resolution.