TV tuner card

In addition, some video cards double as TV tuners, notably the ATI All-In-Wonder series.

The card contains a tuner and an analog-to-digital converter (collectively known as the analog front end) along with demodulation and interface logic.

Some lower-end cards lack an onboard processor and, like a Winmodem, rely on the system's CPU for demodulation.

Some cards also have analog input (composite video or S-Video) and many also provide a radio tuner.

[1] More-advanced TV tuners encode the signal to Motion JPEG or MPEG, relieving the main CPU of this load.

As many regions around the world convert from analog to digital broadcasts, these tuners are gaining popularity.

These small tuners generally do not have hardware encoding due to size and heat constraints.

The FM radio spectrum is close to (or even inside) that used by VHF terrestrial TV broadcasts.

New technologies allow PCI-Express and HD-SDI to be implemented on video capture cards at lower costs than before.

Some care is required to select suitable host systems for video encoding, particularly HD applications which are more affected by CPU performance, number of CPU cores, and certain motherboard characteristics that heavily influence capture performance.