[SOLVED] TV Tuner cards & software to use with them

[onexused]

I have a couple questions. But first, what I'm trying to do:
I have a TV that I could use for this stuff, but it'd be much nicer to be able to use my computer / my computer's monitor for this. I'd like to be able to watch TV, as well as play games for consoles that don't yet have emulators, using my computer monitor. I understand that MythTV's often used for watching TV on Linux, and that it wouldn't be good for playing games.

1) What's a good TV tuner card to use for both watching TV, and attaching the console to? Optimally, it'd do hardware encoding of MPEG2 for when I'm watching/recording TV and be able to use both NTSC and ATSC/analog and digital signals.
2) What (tv viewing?) program can I use to see the games while playing them on the console? Is this possible, even? Some people I've talked to seem to think not.
2b) If I can't do this with a program and TV tuner card, what can I do it with? No, I don't want to just use a TV.

[nativemad]

Hi,

Yes, you're right, it wouldn't be a good idea to try to play console-games over a streamed solution (mythtv)...

You could use any tv-tuner-card around with decent linux drivers... The Hauppage pvr-series (with mpeg decoder) are quite good, but i don't know if they are able to handle digital signals!?!

Then again, you could use any TV-app... for example tvtime, kdetv, xawtv and so on. They should all be able to get the composite-input...

Cheers
_________________
Power to the people!

[onexused]

Thanks for the info.
I looked it up, and the Hauppauge PVR cards I saw -are- analog only. The pcHDTV card series was recommended to me on #gentoo. Since they can use digital signals, I think I'll get one of them, even though it looks like they don't have hardware MPEG2 encoders. I have a good enough CPU, I'd rather do software encoding of the stream when necessary, than have to use a digital converter box.