I was thinking about buying a tv card, but I had a basic question. I have a Pentium III with 512 Ram, but I have a budget graphics card (Riva TNT that came with computer) . Do I need a good graphics card to watch tv? I don't want to buy a card if it isn't going to be worth it. Thanks for any help.

I used to use my ATI TV VE card on a Athlon 650 with 384M memory and a TNT2 M64 card with no problems. I also surfed the web at the same time. I didn't measure the memory usage for X, but I never saw any lag. Probably wouldn't try it while running an OpenGL 3D app or something else that would suck the Memory out of your card.

Not wanting to boast, but I had a Pentium Pro 180MHz with 64Mb memory and a crappy no-name 8Mb video card, but the Pinnacle TV card worked fine. I think these things use very little processing power.

no problem, I've been using a VIA Apollo mb with AMD 400 mhz
and a BT878 TV card with no problems

Thanks for all the replies. I went ahead and bought a Pinnacle PCTV card. I hope it works.

@oulevon

have you get the card to work? i am using the same card, and i am a newbie at linux (i installed it first time yesterday, Suse8.1) the Yast Installer detected the card at the correctly name, but it seems not work, all TV programs included with KDE are not finding any single TV Program...

I had a hard time getting it to work in Redhat 9, and then I read an article that said that Mandrake 9.1 came with all the support installed so I downloaded that and installed it, and it was detected and works fine. What kind of output are you getting from the programs? Blue screen? snow?

the screen has the typical ants-war flimmering at the top (a horizional line of about 10-15% of the screen) and all under that is blue. When going with the mouse over the screen, the mouse pointer "fills" the blue with black...
and that screen is not changing during channel search...
i had exactly the same problem under winxp with the open source TV project Virtuadubb... i corrected this over the Pinnacle Vision Software. When Vision was open and selected a channel, i saw the same channel in Virtuadub, but Virtuadub could not change the channel itself...

i have just got a copy of 8.2 Suse Prof.. maybe it will work with that...

Anybody with TV card problems go to http://www.mind.lu/~yg/ftvco/

They have a script that tries a bunch of settings. Worked for me.