Watching cable TV on your PC monitor...possible?

[bappel]

I just got a 20" samsung flat panel computer monitor and I want to be able to watch cable television thru my pc. Is there a cable/adapter that lets you plug the coaxial cable in one end and hook it into the monitor on the other end? The monitor has a DVI and analog input

Are there any other options? I'd like to keep any solutions cheaper than the cost of buying a seperate television.

[Midknyte]

You would need a tv tuner card. You can't just hook up the cable to the monitor.

[Sterling_Aug]

I watch cable TV all the time on my desktop PC and my laptop PC using a TV tuner card on each.

[AllGamer]

i'll recommend the ATI USB TV turner, it is easy to move onto any machine you want.

specially if you have both Desktop and Laptop

else get the regular ATI TV series of card, the newer ones comes in HDTV and Digital as well.

[bappel]

I've got a Nintendo Wii I'd like to be able to play thru the monitor as well. I know some of the TV tuners have delays, but the Wii relies on motion sensing technology and if that is delayed it pretty much makes it impossible to play.

Looks like I'll have to get a TV as well....unless you have any other suggestions.

[Peter M]

PCI TV cards can run in lagless direct-to-overlay mode, wherein they transfer straight onto the graphics card's memory without passing through the main RAM and CPU first. You're no more than one frame behind signal reception.

USB TV gadgets are much much worse at that - they compress to MPEG2, have the USB controller transfer the data into main RAM, let the CPU decompress it again with a little help from the GPU, transfer that onto the graphics card and then finally scale and render.

That produces no more lag then any LCD TV's internal processing, which inherently does exactly the same thing, only with much less expensive hardware.

[bappel]

So what I should really do is get an LCD TV instead of a pc monitor and just hook the PC and Wii to that and be done with it.

[Peter M]

I'd still get a PC monitor and a PCI TV card. The LCD TV solution isn't any faster in terms of game lag, and having the TV tuner in the PC also lets you do digital recordings.