If you just want to record video tapes you have allready you can use the Video-in of your video-card.
If you want to record tv-transmissions you need a TV-Tuner card. Basically this is what's in you TV-as well and does nothing but translate the signal from your cable-tv or antenna. This can be a PCI-card, a PCMCIA-card of an external USB(2)-device.
Fot both these types, you're going to need some software that captures whatever signal you're recording and converts it into a video-file, such as an .AVI of .MPG-file. Usually this is done in two phases: 1) a 'raw' recording, uncompressed and very, very large is saved to your harddisk 2) this file is compressed using any compressions algoriithm, such as MPG2 (videoCD), MPEG4 (Divx) or whatever.
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