Computer newbies forum: How Can I Watch TV on My Laptop?

you can buy a t.v card from most computer stores and on the bo it tells you the spec needed, but they probably can be quite expensie to buy and put in.

If you've got any PC (formerly PCMCIA) card slots, you can buy TV cards that you just stick into one of them. Check the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCMCIA . Don't know about specific brands but I know that you can get them.

I found a usb tuner on hauppauge's site. The wintv-pvr-usb2 looks like its exaclty what I want. Forgive me for my ignorance but I don't know which to buy- the ntsc version or the pal version. I want to record from my dish pvr and burn dvds on my toshiba laptop. Thanks for the help!

I am assuming you dont have cable in your house, and want to watch TV over the Internet.

I have a nice, new, powerful Laptop with broadband connection. Even with that, my question is: What can you watch over the internet?

Even if you are able to connect to the Internet, you will have endless problems with streaming media over a dialup connection, which I have problems with over a broadband cable modem connection. Something else to consider is how much video ram the computer has, should be at least 32MB.

Theres a whole lot of movie clips and previews out there, but you will have a hard time finding things like regular TV shows like the Simpsons, or any of the decline of the western mind reality shows that fill the air waves.

I have looked at the adds for a USB TV tuner, they all promise hundreds of movies and thousands of channels, but never tell you what they are, it appears that most, if not all of them are for plugging in your cable connection into your computer instead of a TV. I looked at software online that promised the same thing, but they were just selling peer to peer software identical to Napster or Bearshare.

Fortunately if you are like myself and miss the news; CNN and CBS have free streaming news (CBS even has stuff from 48 hours and 60 minutes).

http://www.cnn.com/video/
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml

And you can catch clips from the best news show on TV at: http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show/index.jhtml

NPR has good streaming audio (if your connection is weak, this will work better)
http://www.npr.org/
All things considered, Talk of the nation, Car Talk, Morning edition, etc

Starz Network offers a paid subscription (through real networks www.real.com) to live streaming movies, and download movies files for 3 or 4 viewings. They are the only network I know of that have this, I suspect it will not be much longer before more companies are doing the same. Starz charges about $12 a month for the subscription, the streaming shows work ok, but have not had any luck so far with downloading movies.

The best news channel I have seen so far is at www.nakednews.com .Has a lot of your regular news headlines, sport and entertainment news plus it's relly easy on the eyes after a long day of typing.

You really ned a boadband connection though. Itried watching it over dial up years ago and it was unwatchable. Cable is Cool!!!

is there any way to watch tv on a laptop outside the home the way one would with a portable handheld tv?

With those requirements you will be able to watch tv. Aslong as the processor is greater than 333 MHz. You may want to make sure that there is a video and sound card though. For more information you can visit http://www.squidoo.com/watch-tv-on-laptop where they have an interesting article you may like to read.

Good Luck