Feeding video to a PC

[reho33]

I have my Fortec Star N/A fed to a Video capture card on my desktop PC. This gives me several things:

1) I free up a real TV.
2) I can look at Internet links related to Satellite TV and compare information on the spot instead of having to print it out and go back and forth.
3) If your sound card in the PC is SPDIF capable, then you could feed the AC3 audio through with no extra stereo to install.

This setup works very well for me. Even though I am using an S-Video cable, the picture is still a little "grainy". A "real TV" might have better quality.

But if you have a Twinhan card, just disregard all I have said above.

[wejones]

Originally Posted by reho33

I have my Fortec Star N/A fed to a Video capture card on my desktop PC. This gives me several things:

1) I free up a real TV.
2) I can look at Internet links related to Satellite TV and compare information on the spot instead of having to print it out and go back and forth.
3) If your sound card in the PC is SPDIF capable, then you could feed the AC3 audio through with no extra stereo to install.

This setup works very well for me. Even though I am using an S-Video cable, the picture is still a little "grainy". A "real TV" might have better quality.

But if you have a Twinhan card, just disregard all I have said above.

Well, I have a Twinhan card...... :-)

But I'm curious about one thing about your setup above. When using the SPDIF for AC3, do you get your audio/video in sync? I'm also curious whether the PC video is delayed relative to the video directly from your Fortec receiver? Ie basically, I'm just curious how much if any PC processing is involved.
Sometimes, I run the output of my Fortec Ultra "directly" to a TV {"directly" meaning through my TIVO, which introduces a processing delay}, and at the same time feed the same sat signal to my Twinhan, then re-broadcast that over my local network to my laptop, so that I'm watching the same show on TV, and on my laptop. In this senario, there is generally a couple second delay of what I see on the laptop vs the TV. However last NFL season, I was watching football games on DTV/TIVO, while using my Twinhan to feed HD feeds from satellite, while using a Sirius sat radio fed into another TIVO then to my stereo to give me "home team audio". This got quite complicated relative to synchronizing all the various delays, because each element of my "system" seemed to have different delays involved, and I was seeing up to 20 second delays at times between different signal sources (although some were introduced by the networks). Luckily, the things going through the TIVOs could be synchronized with each other, but the raw Twinhan feeds couldn't.

Anyway, I find all these processing delays interesting, and I'm just curious what, if any delays you observed on audio or video. Perhaps it is all hardware processing, and very fast?