<p>so my roomie and i both want a tv. but i cant think of a reasonable way to do this. like if she bought it, and i bought the microfridge, she would keep the tv but the microfridge would go back to UCLA so would that be fair??? (thats the closest i can get to being fair haha)...splitting the cost of the tv would be bad because then who would take it home at the end would be an issue...so what do u guys recommend?</p>
<p>I wouldn't recommend buying a TV... I'm assuming either you or your roommate has more than one TV at home, so whoever has the most portable spare one should bring it to UCLA (unless it's too big to carry). TV tuner cards/USB devices are also becoming more and more affordable for college students as well.</p>
<p>bring your own tv and split the cost of the microfridge. haha problem solved!</p>
<p>I'm bringing the TV turner card, which solves that problem somehwta. However I'll be in a suite, so we'll also likely want a TV in the living room.</p>
<p>does each room have two cable jacks? or will i have to buy a splitter?</p>
<p>noooo...tuner cards all the way! Trust me. It's way better, it's like a mini tivo inside your computer :)</p>
<p>whats a tuner card? can someone explain it?</p>
<p>Basically it's a card that will allow you to watch TV on your computer. The one I just bought ran me $40 (after $60 worth of rebates which I'm hoping to get before the turn of the next century) so they're not terribly expensive. They seem to be a good option if you want to save some space. Plus as has already been said, many do allow you to record on them, so it also serves as a makeshift VCR.</p>
<p>oh wow! that sounds like a really good option, and cheaper than a tv...does it have all the channels and stuff?? i dont get how it works haha</p>
<p>this tuner thing sounds really cool. could you explain it more plz?</p>
<p>fyi - the tv tuner is only really a viable option if you use a desktop computer - I know there are some for laptops, but I can't imagine them working too well over a USB connection.</p>
<p>ok that just broke my heart haha...back to the tv it is then....</p>
<p>also, what size of a tv do you all recommend for dorm rooms?</p>
<p>Icarus I'm running mine on a laptop and it works pretty well. I've got a decently powerful laptop however.</p>
<p>Yeah, usb tv tuners work fine over usb2. The only problem is that the tuner might not be hardware based and that will use a lot of cpu usage when recording.</p>
<p>generally, if the tuner is around 80bucks or so and up, it will be hardware based and this drastically reduces the workload on the cpu and puts it onto the mpeg2 encoder onboard i believe</p>
<p>Depends on the format you record it in. Generally an hour of recording in low quality takes about 700mb. I've yet to really play around with the thing yet, but in this day of huge hard drives, 700mb is not really that bad.</p>
<p>ah - i stand corrected then. Sorry about the misinformation - I just assumed that a device normally reserved for a PCI-type slot wouldn't be able to work very well over a USB port.</p>
<p>the only USB2 one that has a hardware MPEG encoder is the Hauppage Win-TV PVR USB2. it costs $150 though.</p>
<p>but honestly, if your laptop is pretty new/powerful (Pentium 4/Pentium-M/AMD 64, 512+ RAM, etc) it should handle software encoding without much of a hiccup.</p>
<p>^Actually I just got myself that exact one, and it only ran me $40 after all the rebates. It was only $100 before the rebates.</p>
<p>wow, thats a great price for that one! where/when was this?</p>