This is How To is based on living in the UK and having NTL as your cable TV supplier.

The graphics cards used were both XFX, one a 7800GTX 256mb and the other a 6600GT 256mb. The operating system was XP Pro.

In my house I only get to watch TV when every one else is in bed, if I do get a chance during the day I get one to five of my kids making so much noise that I simply can't hear the dam thing.

Now ATI have their all-in-wonder cards but NVIDIA don't but you can buy a NVIDIA TV card separately. If you've spent £200-300 on a graphics card then another £45 plus just isn't on the books for me, not yet any case.

I sat thinking on how I could watch TV on my PC using the VIVO on my 7800GTX and after an hours worth of googling I found very little. So I gave Duffman a quick phone call to find out if he knew of any PC/TV related sites. He gave me one of the main sites he used for his TV card. After following a few links I found two programs that looked promising.

I downloaded both one was a 30 day trial and the other was free running under a GNU General Public License.

On the same day I had NTL (uk cable company) come out a fit me a nice new NTL TV box, we have sky TV on the main TV of the house and I didn't want to watch the same program that my wife was watching as I don't like those soap operas.

The cable box only had RF-out and scart out on the back but luckily I had a scart to s-video/composite and audio out plug. This maybe different in other countries and UK areas and I can only base this how to on the Samsung SMT-2100C Ntl cable box.

Then I hooked the wires up to the VIVO cable attached to my 7800GTX

I then set about trying the two downloads I had got earlier, the 30 day trial software just didn't give a very good picture no matter what setting I used so I gave up on that and moved to DScaler. Now DScaler has lots of settings to adjust the screen, colours, interlace, etc.

After about an hour of trying different setting I got the best picture I could get from what I understood of the program, I need to read the documentation and try more combinations of settings but this will take a few weeks, I am very happy with the picture quality for the moment and it does what I need it to. The very top two pictures are from DScaler's built in screen capture, I had to use my camera to show that it was running on my PC as the screen grab(print screen key) wouldn't work while running DScaler.

You will need to experiment as settings will be very different from card to card. It may also be different on other operating system.

DScaler can be found on this site.

A very big thank you from me must go to those involved in creating DScaler.

If you have an questions or problems that I may help with please head over to the Cable/Satellite On VIVO thread on the forums