Mini PCI-E TV tuners, need to understand them better.

I have seen a few TV tuners on eBay in Mini PCI-E flavor, and since i noticed that Windows 7's Media Center natively supports internal TV tuners. I also decided it would be a great supplement to our current "get all of our TV over internet" setup, but there are some things i haven't cleared up.

1-I know they are easy to install, just take my keyboard off and pop it in, then drivers, but i want to know, do you NEED to have an external antenna or is it built in? I really want this TV tuner to be seamlessly fitted inside the notebook so that i can watch TV without any cords or external items.

2-I have seen a few TV tuners on eBay, with Avermedia being the most prominent, however, none of the product descriptions state what area of the world they are designed for, as i need a North American compatible signal format one, where can i find one that i know will work in North America?

3-How much heat does it put off?

4-Are these type of Mini PCI-E cards whitelisted by Lenovo?


Thanks for input everyone, i appreciate it.

 

I don't know about all that other stuff you asked, but I can tell you you will always need an antenna of some sort or the other. (unless of course you use cable?) So no matter how you look at it, wires are a given somewhere in the mix. This little pen sized antenna should come with the unit.

Incidentally, WMC can support TWO tuners. So if your budget would support it, I suggest you look for a device with two tuners. That way you can watch one program and record another if you need to. Way back in my VCR days, I used to use this feature a lot.

 

Where could an antenna plug into? I hope you don't need separate jacks just for that do you?

 

It should be a pin connection similar to your cable connection. You have to either plug in the cable or the antenna. It's pretty unobtrusive though.

 

North American signals are referred to as ATSC for digital HDTV and the old/obsolete NTSC for analog.

As far as an internal tuner, look to your laptop maker to see if they ever included one with your machine and try to find that one on ebay. Can't go wrong with that direction.

Remember though that every piece of hardware you add to a machine will take power to run. I don't know the numbers for an internal tuner, but if you settle on an external USB device you can at least unplug it when not in use.

 

Oh yes, well i'm not concerned about power usage much anymore since my battery died suddenly when i thought i was using AC power, when the adapter wasn't plugged in, at that moment i was playing GTA 4, and it randomly shut off, then i was like, oh... the damn power adapter wasn't actually plugged in, so basically i think that's what killed my batt, since it won't boot on battery alone. I was jsut concerned about heat, as the one i just bought off of eBay seems to have a small heatsink overtop.


Thanks for the responses, but what kind of jack do you need to plug it into, Mini PCI-E is inside the laptop, so would it just use the microphone jack?

Edit: just discovered it supports DVB-T, and that is digital signal, but sadly that is only in use in Europe mostly, as "newsposter" said, ATSC is the NA standard, which sucks because this card does not support ATSC only NTSC... Which means i'll probably get poorer quality based on distance from transmitter right? Since NTSC is analog and analog quality diminishes with distance, is this correct?

 

Ah, no more (legal) NTSC broadcasts. A NTSC-only device might pick up channels on cable but that's about it.

I know that Comcast is totally phasing out their NTSC analog over the next month or three. Comcast is supplying no-cost minimalist digital catv tuners to their customers who have analog-only tv sets.

I believe that retail brick and mortar stores can't legally sell NTSC-only devices of any kind anymore. On-line auction sellers are probably under no such restriction.

You really need to look at ATSC capable devices only.

 

Yeah well i've already ordered it so i'm screwed, but i'll be able to watch NTSC TV until 2011 because i live in Canada and we are ratifying ATSC later than the US, what a waste of money... it'll basically be useless now because i'll only be able to pick up local crap which usually isn't any good anyways compared to continental network TV.

 

if you have satellite television you could get a dvb-s to dvb-t transmodulator. but i cant really think of anything else unless you could find something to transmit in ntsc but going digtal to analog is kinda pointless.