Im looking for a TV Tuner card for my computer

not looking for anything spectacular but I found this and seems almost too good to be true.

http://cgi.ebay.com/New-TV-tuner-Video- ... dZViewItem

I doubt it has a hardware encoder for that price, which means if you're recording stuff, you have to rely on your processor to do the encoding.

You also might want to find out the brand, or at least what brand chipset they are using. If it is a Lifeview brand card, and a remote is important to you, I'd say don't get it.

Hauppage cards are usually really good. It's what most people tend to use in Linux PVR systems.

I personally have the PVR-150MCE and I'm really happy with it. The only problem is that it's a bit pricey if you're wanting something dirt-cheap and the software that comes with it kinda sucks.

well i dont plan on doing more than one thing at a time, i just dont feel like buying a TV for next year when i move out of the dorms, but would like to watch TV sometimes, that one comes with a remote. Just the 2.99 plus shipping seems odd to me.

I'm sure it will work for just watching TV, but I wouldn't try making a fancy DVR with it.

Can it be used for PC's also? I am sorry, I am a layman and don't have a great deal of computer knowledge....

You mean for Windows? Yes.

So Linux is the same hardware? Is it just like windows 2000 vs windows xp (in that I could install 2000 and then without changing anything install xp 10 minutes later)?

Keep in mind that it is also $20 for shipping, which actually puts it in the price range of most low-end tv tuner cards.

Assuming the hardware meets XP requirements, yes. If you wanted, you could install DOS on that brand new Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. I know I got bored one day and loaded MS-DOS 5.2 on a skt423 Pentium 4 @ 1.3Ghz. Played Coster in like 2 seconds flat man.

Up-until recently, when Apple left IBM's PowerPC chipset, Apple was the only major manufacturer of general consumer PC Hardware that was not interchangable with the general x86 or i386 archeticture that Intel and AMD market. Eventually though, the processors will have to begin to lose the older instruction sets to make way for more efficient systems.