Probably not the best time to ask, but...

You can get an external tuner (USB) or a PCMCIA one. google it and check newegg and places like that. They're out there; I looked before I got my internal one. Thing is, AW would sell it to you, but for the m9700, it will only work in Media Center edition of Windows.

Yeah, that would work, the difference in brands doesn't make a difference. I have been using an ATI all-in-wonder video card w/ tv tuner on my desktop for almost two years now, and it has been great, no complaints whatsoever...

Have you called and asked AW if it would be possible to send it back and get the tv tuner installed as an upgrade?

The external things will work fine, but it's pretty handy to have it built in if you use it a lot...

LOL, I hear you. The usb or external tv tuner will do the same thing as the internal, and it should work great for transfering tapes to digital files. You'll be able to fit a ton of vhs tapes on a single dvd also.

About media center edition, I've never had it before so I can't really say, but you should be able to convert the vhs tapes to a format that will play on any dvd player. I understand that it used to be difficult early on to get dvd formats to cooperate, but with the combination drives and media that works with different formats it seems to be getting much better.

I've never burnt anything to dvd myself, still using cd's. My m9700 will be the first machine I'll be burning dvd's with. My older 5500 has a dvd burner, but I've never used it for that...

In regards to putting vhs tapes into digital and on your hd or in a format you can burn, it all depends on the settings you use to make the new files. You won't get really high quality files from vhs though, as they tend to be low res and not high quality. The more you convert, the more detail you'll lose also.

As for size of the files, a lot will depend on how much you compress the content as to size of the final files. You can record things at different bit rates that will affect quality, and final size also, so I really don't know how much stuff you'll be able to fit onto a DVD...

I've ripped a couple dvd movies, and converted them to mpeg movies that I was able to burn to cd's. In the process, you basically tell the software how large you want the final file, but the larger the final file the better quality usually. It's all a bit of trial and errror until you get used to it. If you rip a DVD directly to your hard drive, it'll be huge, like 4-6G for most movies. You can then convert that file to other forms like mpeg or avi, and compress them down to 700M so they'll fit on a single cd, or two 700M files to put on two cd's. Obviously the less compression the higher the quality...

I'll be converting vhs tapes to digital and burning to dvd also once I get my m9700 and some time, so I'll be trying to figure this out too. It's a new area for me though, so sorry I can't answer your question better...

Straker here this is cheaper

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.as...662&adid=17662

The resolution on that VOX tv-tuner is only 720x480 Not to sure about the ATI one with Resolution, but Im sure it is better.

VOX maybe good.

I've used one of these:

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/product...prod/AVC-2210/

To transfer vhs to dvd (under linux). It doesn't have a tv-tuner, just composite in. The nice thing is, the video stream it outputs is already mpeg2, so no transcoding required.

This:

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/product...o_pc/AVC-2310/

is the version that has a tv-tuner. Probably has the same compatability.

That's true, for vhs to digital, you can use a video capture card that doesn't also have the tv-tuner incorporated...