I have been discussing with a friend recently about obtaining an HDTV tuner card or device. One problem we are running into is finding a good card, but also some of the terminology is giving us trouble. Some cards say they are "free-over-the-air" HD, I presume this means anything you can get with just a normal set of rabbit ears? If it is a "free-over-the-air", does this mean it cannot receive HD from a cable company providing digital cable over the coax lines? One thing we found, to our pitiful credit, is that we need to have an ATSC tuner on the card, but is this backwards compatible with NTSC? The other quandry is whether our computers will have the necessary hardware to actually run HD, from what I have read it requires A LOT of computing power, more than some of my games! But making an upgrade is easy enough. General discussion is welcome, please any thoughts, suggestions, potential problems to avoid are welcome. Peace!

__________________
Motherboard/OS: MachSpeed/XP Prof
RAM: 2GB
Hard Drive: 250GB
CPU: AMD Athalon 3200+
Graphics/Video: 512 MB

Good day. Okay, so if you want to pick up over-the-air HD signals (which is just broadcast like any other channel you'd pick up with rabbit ears), you can do so with an antenna--you can build your own (there are guides online), or pick up an amplified antenna from a local electronics shop.

I believe the interface for connecting to the tuner card is just a coaxial connection. So any HD you might have from your cable provider should also work (assuming that connections from the junction box are coaxial as well) to my understanding.

I think the system requirements you are thinking of are for HD video (either blu-ray or HD dvd)--not HD broadcasts. Actually, system requirements for viewing HD from a tuner card is relatively low--I think something like a P4 1.8GHz and 256/512mb system RAM. I believe a lot of the signal processing of the HD is done by the tuner card, so dependance on system resources isn't as much as if you pop a HD DVD in your HD DVD drive and want to watch a movie--in this case, your CPU/RAM are utilized more for signal processing. So you should be fine. My roommate is using my old AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (2GHz), 256mb system RAM for his HD TV tuner, and it's plenty.

Hopefully that answers all of the questions. I think the ATSC/NTSC issue isn't a problem. As far as I understand, and ATSC tuner is just an HD signal tuner--obviously you'd need that to pick up HD signals. The format of the video will still be NTSC if that's what the broadcast signal uses.

Okay, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

__________________
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (@2.6 GHz)
2x1GB OCZ Spec. Ops. PC3200
ASRock Dual939-SATA2
Antec TruePower 550 watt PSU
80 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 rpm
300 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 rpm
120 GB Maxtor ATA/133 7200 rpm
ATI Radeon x1950 Pro