Perfoma 5260 whith TV Software

Firstly, you'll need a video-in card. I believe the part number is 661-0159. This will let you use a VCR (or DVD player) to change channels and watch movies. Card has L/R audio+composite inputs and an S-Video input.

Or, to use the Mac as the tuner you'll need an Apple TV Tuner Card Macintosh 820-0549-A. You'll the the video-in card as well for the TV tuner card to work.

Installing either is a snap. The Input card plugs into an existing slot on your motherboard. Also remove the small bezel on the mobo's backing plate so the ports are exposed. The TV tuner card has it's owl slot to go into. You can't mis it on the back, it's a long rectangle with a circle in the bezel. The cable for that should be ticked in the slot for eazy access.

Either way you go you'll need the Apple Video Player software installed. It should be a standard extra with your OS was installed. I believe it can be gotten as a seperate download from the Apple archives if someone else here doesn't provide a link for it. With the AVP you can capture snippets of video of still frames. On the older machine it's tricky/impractical to capture video.

Hope that helps a bit.

-Dk

We use a 5260/100 as a TV in our house (the only TV ATM) and it's setup to boot AVP from an alias in the Startup Items folder. Thus, we just use a small univeral remote (Zenith SP?) set to a Sony code. That will power it up/down do audio level, channel switch and mute. Then we have to use the mouse to switch to the A/V inputs to use a DVD player or to hook up a game system for my daughter.

if you need it, im pretty sure that i have a boxed Video card with its manuals and software somewhere around the house.... a few months back i inherited a Performa 5215CD and went the TV tuner route... but ended up buying a video kit and a tv kit.... (only ended up needing TV kit, since it includes video part...) so, i know it is around somwhere, if you want it... let me know... if you just want the software i can get that to you as well.

i also had horrible problems with monitor geometery and adjustment, and through help of internet and other forum members i found the required software and how to build the cable required to adjust geometery, color, etc on 5215 internal monitor (i believe yours is the same) i also have apple service docs for this series.... if you (or any other forum member) needs/wants this info just let me know

...bill

The problem with the 5260 is that the video is stuck at 640x480. IIRC, the other NuBus 5xxx series could do 800x600. I Dunno if that was just a mobo limitation, or if the CRT is actually different.

I'm using a 5300/75 as TV in my bedroom. Have used it for five years, but the picture tube is about to give up the ghost. Turns all white after about an hour.

It's pretty cool.

So I'm transferring the AV card and TV Tuner to a Quadra 630 which I'm setting up as my home server with an 80GB drive. Makes sense to me since the server will be on all the time and watching TV will be a simple matter of turning on the 21" monitor and running Apple Video Player.

The 640x480 resolution is not so much as problem with standard TV. Its about the level of the best picture you can get with a standard NTSC signal (525 lines vertical with overscan is around 480, and the horizontal resolution of 640 is just below the theoretical maximum of 800 lines). The Video card feeds the VRAM directly, so you'll get 16-bit color for TV viewing, which is pretty decent.

The only better machine for this setup would be the Performa 6360, which is unfortunately very difficult to find in Asia. With the 6360, you could add a USB/FW card and have a server that can share USB/FW/ and SCSI drives to the network. For Ethernet you could add a commslot II card.

Another cool setup I've tried is a Beige G3 with AV personality card hooked up to an ATI external TV tuner. You get lots of cool stuff like a "keyword" catcher that beeps and does nifty stuff like bring the TV picture to the foreground whenever a word you choose like "Macintosh" appears in the ClosedCaptioning feed.