Well, I don’t know about TV, but TV cards certainly are. For several years, I’ve been using a Hauppauge DVB-s. Being a digital satellite TV receiver for the PCI slot, I had to leave my PC turned on if I wanted to record something. Using a software named ProgDVB instead of the original Hauppauge software, it was possible to stream the TV screen to any machine in my network.
The only problem with this card was that it crashed my PC on average every two hours. This might be attributed to a problem with the specific hardware, but I’ve had it running on two different mainboards and three diffrent graphics card on my main PC and later on yet another system, the symptoms were always the same.
Two years ago, I decided to eliminate this inconvenience by buying a Siemens Gigaset M 750 S, a stand-alone digital satellite TV box, which internally was nothing but a small PC running linux with some digital TV decoder built-in. Combined with a Java application called PVRpilot, it could stream the TV screen into my network and could be viewed with any VLC streaming compatible player.
On the downside, I crashes very often. Sometimes it runs a week, sometimes it crashes two or three times in a day. This problem is intensified by the fact that, after the crash, you have to unplug the box in order to reset it. Then it will boot (which takes about 50 seconds!), display a message box on my non-existent TV, telling me that I should shut down the darn thing before pulling out the power cord, and shut down again (which takes another 30 seconds). Then I can press the Stand-By button to boot it up again (yes, 50 seconds once more).
When using its streaming capabilities, you have to turn of any external recording media (USB drives and network shares), otherwise the streamed TV image will be corrupted and the scratches in the audio will hurt your ears…
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