Does anyone have any experience with TV tuners in their x series laptops? Can I get an internal one, or does it have to be a USB external tuner??

Any suggestions/recommendations would be appreciated!
Thanks!

What do you mean by that, "internal"? A PC-Card solution? To my knowledge, the AverMedia AverTV Cardbus...

http://www.avermedia.com/cgi-bin/produc ... ardBus.asp

...is the only solution for analogue TV, and then there's the SCM Mobile Terrestrial Receiver...

http://www.scmmicro.com/dvb/terrestrial.html

...for the DVB-T standard. I don't see any major benefits with those cards, though, as they protrude very much from the slot and thus have to be removed when the notebook is lugged around.

I'd always resort to a small and lightweight external USB2 solution, which can be used with a desktop PC, too. Have an eye on solutions that draw their power from the USB port and don't need an external power supply, however.

Examples:

For analogue TV:

Pinnacle PCTV USB2:
http://www.everythingusb.com/hardware/i ... review.htm

AVerMedia UltraTV USB 300
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1605894,00.asp
http://www.hometheaterspot.com/html/rev ... php?rev=48

For digital terrestrial TV (DVB-T):

TwinHan VisionDTV USB-Ter:
http://www.twinhan.com/visiontv-2_4.htm

One of the very few DVB-T USB boxes (if not the only one yet) without external power requirements, if I recall correctly. A detailed review (in German) with many photographs and even screen shots of the TV window can be found here:

http://www.alltests.de/hardware/reviews ... plus_1.php

Babelfish translation German->English:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfis ... p&lp=de_en

Finally, here you got some links to further reviews:

http://www.tv-cards.com/reviews.php


Best regards,
Monty

My experience is limited to the old LifeView card, which had jerky video and crappy audio, but worked with minimum resource requirements. The main reason I dropped it is the USB port on my Sony laptops apparently didn't output the power specs, though it worked fine with my Thinkpads as the time.

I'm thinking of trying again, but I'd go with the DigiStor USB 2.0 version (http://digistor.com/index.asp?PageActio ... &ProdID=53) because it's the most compact and will work with Windows 2000 as well as XP; most modern tuners require XP.

Emanuel