These small tuners generally do not have hardware encoding due to size and heat constraints. Small USB tuner sticks have become more popular in 20 and are expected to increase in popularity. The tuner cards with this 'hardware encoding' are generally thought of as being higher quality. 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. As many regions around the world convert from analog to digital broadcasts, these tuners are gaining popularity. The advantages over two separate cards are cost and utilization of expansion slots in the computer. The card operates as an analog tuner and a digital tuner simultaneously. One can watch analog while recording digital, or vice versa. This is similar to a hybrid tuner, except there are two separate tuners on the card. The card operates as a digital tuner or an analog tuner until reconfigured. Switching between the systems is fairly easy, but cannot be done immediately. More-advanced TV tuners encode the signal to Motion JPEG or MPEG, relieving the main CPU of this load.ĭigital tuners Hybrid tuners Ī hybrid tuner has one tuner that can be configured to act as an analog tuner or a digital tuner. MicroTV for Apple Macintosh II, which debuted in 1989.

Some cards also have analog input ( composite video or S-Video) and many also provide a radio tuner.Īn early example was the Aapps Corp. 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.

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