Watching TV on laptop?

upsy-daisy_3

Please help, My other half is a truck driver and usually away monday - friday and gets very bored at night time watching the same old dvds on his laptop! He doesnt have wireless internet. But he mentioned some time ago about being able to plug something in to watch tv on the laptop. Id like to buy him whatever it is he would need but have no idea where to start. Any help much appreciated!

aliasojo

You can get a usb tv tuner, something like one of these....
http://www.usbtvtuner.co.uk/

You also need an aerial to plug into the end of it, you can get really small aerials suitable for this that wouldn't be a problem to lug around.

Edit: Some of the usb tuners on that site have an antenna/aerial included.

bondy01

I've a cheap peak usb tuner (less than £20) that I can use with my laptop. The small mag mount aerial supplied isn't great in poor signal conditions and if he travels around the country it will need retuning each time.

parallax_20

USB Tuners aren't that good to be honest. I had one but didn't bother using it much as the aerial wasn't very good at picking up a signal.

If he only watches DVD & TV I would just get a dedicated device that does both.
Like this. But this depends on your budget. USB Tuners are cheaper though!

jayme1

parallax_20 wrote: »

USB Tuners aren't that good to be honest. I had one but didn't bother using it much as the aerial wasn't very good at picking up a signal.

If he only watches DVD & TV I would just get a dedicated device that does both.
Like this. But this depends on your budget. USB Tuners are cheaper though!

it depends the included aerials are not very good unless you have a very good or perfect signal.

I use my usb TV tuner with a standard TV aerial and it works very well, does his cab have a TV aerial? or he might be able to just use a TV aerial like this in that case all you need is a usb tuner like this

Dan_Thunder

If there's stuff he'd like to watch on TV but can't he could download a number of programmes from the BBC iplayer site to his laptop on a Sunday night and watch them during the week.

stefano

I believe that some parts of the country have no analogue signal any longer, and other parts will soon follow. Just googled "usb digital tv tuner" and came up with: http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/pctv-nanostick-usb-digital-tv-tuner-for-pc-02544512-pdt.html?srcid=867&xtor=AL-50

neilwoods

It all depends on where hubby drives to, half of the country has not switched over, where tyne tees, yorkshire, Central, Anglia, London, Meridian are analouge. Full switchover wont be till end of 2012

So you are best of getting a Analogue & Digital TV Tuner for the Laptop, and get a better aerial, Maplin has this

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=217748&C=Froogle&U=217748&T=Module

culpepper

I got my tuner in maplins,it plugs into usb and has a little arial with it or you can use a stronger arial as it has an ordinary arial socket on it.. It can be moved around to get a decent signal but works better in some parts of the house than others. Mine came with a disc with a tuning program on it but can be used with other tuning programs too for example virtual dub or in the case of linux, the mplayer version for linux works with it.
He could set it up to tune into different signals depending on the area he is in and just save the seperate profiles so that he can load them in when he is within that particular area to save having to retune every single time. The software with my tuner also allows recording onto the harddrive using two seperate tuning signals so it can record one channel while watching another or just record two channels at once. I think it was about £20.