How to watch tv on a pc?

• is there any way i can watch tv on computer other than buyuing a tv tuner card ? why cant the tv connection be just connected to a usb port and the pc decodes the signals and lets me watch tv ? i dont want to spend money on buying tv tuner card any cheap options ?

• Answer:

  Well, ya gotta buy something to plug your cable into so that you can tune in a channel first. If you're tuning it on a TV and sending the signal out the back through RCA jacks, then there probably is a way to buy a bunch of diodes, resistors, and analog to digital converters at radio shack and then plug it into your usb hub. Then you'd have to write some software to convert the garbage into picture frames, but somebody has already done all that and they must be stuck with more than they can sell, because they are selling them here for less than the cables would cost at radio shack: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1961041&CatId=0 There may be some way to just convert composite output into VGA input, so that you could just use your monitor as a TV not at the same time, but the thing above is $29 and that's as cheap as it's gonna get. just make sure your computer meets the system requirements, live video needs power as mentioned above, the internal stuff is a little cheaper and may perform better. there's one here for $19 http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1698860&CatId=0 http://www.newegg.com has stuff too, and I actually like them better, but tigerdirect.com seems to have better deals on video capture stuff and hard drives for some reason