Does a PC tv card with scart input exist? I’d like to be able to pause and record live tv coming from a virgin cable tv box (scart cable output). The PC is already set up as a media centre (eg music, streamed media and DVDs) so it’s seems silly that I can’t use it for tv too.

I did this years ago with cable. Was a Video input card and used the mic on the sound card .Even Had an IR blaster so the PC could change channels on the box (infra red transmitter taped to the box)

Software worked ok, but quality a bit naff.

Used a Digital Terrestrial card later on Vista which was much much better. Ok you dont get a lot of cable channels, but quality and performance good.

NB Does yor virgin box not record and have TVOD etc?

dunno about virgin – i briefly lookaed at it for sky, but the output needs some sort of intermediary box if you want high quality (720p or whatever it is), otherwise you’re on RGB at best down the “tv” scart (can get a scart to rgb leads converter socket) or even lower quality feed down the “video” scart

can’t remember what the intermediary box was called (but they were a couple of hundred quid I think)

the possible alternative would be a tv/graphics card that is HDSP(?) compliant, then you could use the HDMI input straight in – not sure that this exists (I didn’t find one when I looked, not very hard though)

I have a v+ box which is a hd pvr in one room but the other one that I’m asking about is a bog standard non-hd non pausing one with only scart out. It does have the usual iplayer, tv on demand and so on but that’s not quite the same.

this is the thing I was on about (can’t remember what I was imagining I’d do with it now though 😳 )
http://www.hdfury.com/

bump for the weekday crowd.