Record Live TV

Easily record live tv without the use of expensive dvr’s or TiVo.
All you need is your PC/Laptop and a TV Tuner.

We recommend a computer with at least a P4 2.0GHz and S-video connection.

For this hack we will be using a laptop and Instant TV for notebooks card ($110; adstech.com). First you need to plug in the PCMCIA card into the side of your laptop and install the software. Next, connect your video source to the card and record!

An onscreen proram guide is included with the software but we highly recommend a third-party website titantv.com to schedule automatic recordings such as TiVo. Also, if your laptop has tv-out you can always playback what you’ve recorded on your tv.

The great thing about using your laptop to record tv instead of a TiVo or other such device is the ability to do anything you want with the MPEG-2 recordings. For example, you could edit out all of the commercials, move your recordings to a portable player, or even burn them to dvd for archiving.

Sidenote: If you have a cable box, remember to connect your computer to the cable box because tv tuner cards are usually analog only and they can’t decode the signal for channels over 99.