When I wrote the article “A Student’s Guide to Technology” in July, one thing that wasn’t covered was TV tuners. This wasn’t due to neglect, but simply because we hadn’t looked at a TV tuner for notebooks in a long time, and since we don’t make blind recommendations, there was nothing we could do about it. Until now, anyway, as I’m looking at an ExpressCard TV tuner from AVerMedia.
The AVerTV DVB-T Express retails at just under £60 and comes with a digital tuner and, as you might expect, timeshift and recording capabilities. In the box you get the ExpressCard device itself, which is a 34mm card, a small portable antenna, and an adapter for a standard RF connector. An enclosed CD also contains the AVerTV 6 software, whereby the device is of course compatible with both XP Media Center Edition and Vista Media Center.
The installation was surprisingly painless. To test the card, I plugged it into a notebook running Vista, and then prayed while it checked for drivers. As many may appreciate, Vista driver support can be a patchy affair, but to AVerMedia’s great credit, Windows Update searched for, found, and successfully installed drivers for the card in minutes. This was certainly a good start and bodes well for the rest of the review.
Next came the AVerTV 6 software. Installation was easy enough, and running on Vista didn’t cause any real problems other than the fact that it goes into raw mode because the program can’t handle Aero Glass features. At first glance it’s quite comprehensive software with support for a 7-day EPG, Picture-in-Picture, Picture-out-of-Picture and the UK’s MHEG-5 digital teletext service.
However, as is common with many of these private label software solutions, the user interface leaves a lot to be desired. The skin panel has stepped straight out of dodgy freeware media player territory, with lots of little buttons whose purpose isn’t immediately apparent from the tiny icons. This is illustrated no better than in the 7-day EPG which, while fairly navigable, is narrow and rather ugly to look at.
Luckily, while there’s nothing fancy about the presentation, “most” things at least work. Digital teletext is a nice touch, although a little disappointing that you have to navigate through an external window as it can’t be popped up like a regular TV. However, unlike regular TVs, the service is super fast and navigating with the cursor keys is quick and easy. Unfortunately, the PiP and PoP functions were rather less intuitive, and what was worse, resulted in some dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” crashes. That’s a bit of a shame; However, the player is happy to play in an always-on-top window if you want to watch football while browsing the web or working.
Another feature that was a little disappointing was the 16 channel preview, which shows the next 16 channels and what they show in a full screen grid. While it’s a nice idea in theory, in practice it took far too long to load the 16 other channels to be practical or useful.
No such issues were encountered when using the timeshift or recording features, whether with the AVerTV software or the media center. This particular model records, or rather captures, in MPEG-2 format, the same format in which Freeview broadcasts are encoded. It’s not the most efficient codec on the market and an hour-long program produced a video file just under 2GB in size, but the picture and sound quality of the recordings and broadcasts themselves were fine – or at least no worse than what we normally expect from Freeview -shipments would expect.
It’s also worth noting that some other AVerMedia tuners, including the Express X version, which also comes with a remote control, can record in h.264 at up to 320×240; This makes them ideal for recording shows that you can later watch on your small screen iPod or PMP. Unfortunately, this version doesn’t have such a feature, although you could quite easily transcode the MPEG-2 recordings to the format you want using a number of software tools available on the web.
Alternatively, there is also a hybrid version that provides digital and analogue tuners as part of the package. This may certainly appeal to some, especially if you want to watch TV while recording on another channel, which this model obviously can’t do.
Overall, though, this is a capable and reliable ExpressCard-based TV tuner. The software might not be perfect, but it’s perfectly usable, and you can always use the far more attractive media center. Although the device does get quite warm during use, we haven’t had any issues with quality degradation or crashes due to device overheating. So if you prefer not to use a USB solution and don’t have a PC Card slot on your notebook then this is an excellent choice.
“‘Verdict”‘
A few software glitches aside, this is an excellent ExpressCard-based TV tuner that fully supports XP Media Center Edition and Vista. Installation is quick and easy, and if ExpressCard is definitely what you’re looking for, there aren’t too many other places to look right now.
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