Variants

The interfaces for TV tuner cards are a lot of frequently either PCI bus amplification agenda or the newer PCI Express (PCIe) bus for abounding avant-garde cards, but PCMCIA, ExpressCard, or USB accessories aswell exist. In addition, some video cards bifold as TV tuners, conspicuously the ATI All-In-Wonder series. The agenda contains a tuner and an analog-to-digital advocate (collectively accepted as the analog foreground end) forth with demodulation and interface logic. Some lower-end cards abridgement an onboard processor and, like a Winmodem, await on the system's CPU for demodulation.

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

edit Analog TV tuners

Analog television cards achievement a raw video stream, acceptable for real-time examination but alluringly acute some array of video compression if it is to be recorded. More avant-garde TV tuners encode the arresting to Motion JPEG or MPEG, abating the capital CPU of this load. Some cards aswell accept analog ascribe (composite video or S-Video) and abounding aswell accommodate a tuner (radio).