TV tuners are the unsung heroes of media center PCs. While Blu-ray drives, graphics cards and low-power CPUs make all the headlines, if you’re looking for a true all-in-one multimedia PC, the heart of your system is the TV card. After all, playing downloaded videos, flipping through your photos and listening to your music collection are all good reasons to set up a media center, but it’s not until you’ve added a TV that your multimedia experience is truly complete.
Furthermore, a few years ago just an analog tuner was enough to keep us happy, but with the advent of Sky+ and dedicated Freeview Personal Video Recorders (PVR) we are now demanding the ability to not just tune in to digital TV, but watch one channel while recording another. For this reason, dual digital tuners have become a must-have for the full-fledged media library.
So now that you know how important it is to have TV skills, what’s the best way to get them? First off, you can choose between a TV tuner card (either PCI or PCI-Express) or a USB device. There’s little reason to choose one, but considering your media center is likely to be a fairly permanent system once set up, you can also opt for an internal card to keep things organized.
Having decided which card to use, you now need to decide whether to go with two separate cards or a single card containing two tuners. Again, while it doesn’t matter what you choose, you might as well go for the simplest solution, which is the single card. In other words, if you’re looking to add TV functionality to your PC/Mediacenter, you probably want a card like the one I’m looking at today, the Compro VideoMate E900F.
This PCI Express x1 card not only has two digital tuners, but also accommodates analog transmissions, so you can theoretically choose between two digital tuners, one digital and one analog, and two analog tuners. However, there is a problem – Windows Media Center does not support the use of two different types of tuners at the same time. So you’ll have to choose between either two digital tuners or two analogue tuners – I don’t think that should worry most people too much. While the accompanying software does support the simultaneous use of analog and digital, as we’ll see later, you should avoid using Compro’s software.
The rear of the card also has inputs for receiving video signals from S-video, composite and component video sources, so you can use this card to record digital copies of your old VHS tapes, for example. There is also a mini socket for the radio receiver, another mini socket for the radio signal and two antenna sockets.
In addition to its TV tuner functionality, you also get an FM tuner, although we found that Windows Vista Media Center didn’t recognize this, so once again you had to use the crummy bundled software to listen. Not only that, the reception was unimpressive least of all for us who just about manage to record four stations. Admittedly, the radio reception in our office isn’t great, but it was well below what we would normally expect.
In the box you get the card, a driver CD, a copy of the Ulead DVD MovieFactory 5 SE (to convert the VHS tapes you just recorded to DVDs), a dongle for the extra video inputs, an FM antenna, a low profile board , a remote control, an aux-out audio cable for use with PCs that do not support digital audio, and a power button cable required for the remote to properly turn the PC on and off.
The basic installation of the card is very simple; You plug in the card, turn on the PC and install the drivers. If you just want to use the media center software built into Windows, that’s all. If you don’t, all you have to do is install the VideoMate software. However, if you want to use the remote control and turn the PC off and on properly, things are a bit more complicated…
When you install the card, you must also use the power button cable to connect a set of pins on the card to the regular power button header on the motherboard. You then take the cable from the actual power button on your PC case and connect it to the other set of pins on the card. Now you can turn on the PC with the power button on the remote control.
However, we have identified a problem with this system. When shutting down the system with the remote control while the Windows Media Center software was still running, the PC restarted immediately. Without the media center running, the PC would shut down gracefully, but it’s pretty important for a media center to shut down normally through the media center software.
As for the remote itself, it’s a typical copy of the official Windows Media Center remote, absolutely no different than any other we’ve seen in such a kit. While it works perfectly, if you plan to use this tuner card with Windows Media Center, we recommend that you also purchase the official remote control. It’s nicer looking, better built and doesn’t require fiddling with your power switches – it just works over USB.
When we first installed the card, we also thought that it wasn’t working properly or that it didn’t support using its tuners simultaneously. However, after a little research we found that this was because we didn’t have a second antenna plugged in for the second tuner (I had mistakenly assumed the second antenna socket was for a radio antenna). This was quite confusing as I’ve had a dual digital tuner card for a few years that uses a single antenna input for both tuners. For this newer card, using two seems like an odd step backwards. Compro has informed us that the retail version of this card does indeed come with a one-to-two antenna splitter, so you’re at least up and running right out of the box.
Once that obstacle was overcome, the card worked perfectly, recording over 70 channels into the Vista Media Center. We could easily record one channel while watching another, and (possibly because of the very fast review unit we installed the card in) channel switching was nearly instantaneous. The picture quality was also very good.
Realizing that not everyone will use this card just as a tuner for the built-in Windows Media Center software, we also tried the included software and were amazed that it could only recognize four channels. In addition, the interface is clunky and unintuitive, slow and generally so awkward that we advise you to avoid it at all costs. If you don’t want to use Windows Media Center, you essentially need to buy some decent TV software like SageTV.
“‘Verdict”‘
The Compro VideoMate E900F does a perfectly decent job as a basic dual TV tuner card, and while the remote control is a reasonable alternative to the official Windows Media Center, we’d still prefer the latter for ease of setup. The additional video ports could also come in handy and with some decent software the radio could appeal to some too. However, if all you want is a dedicated digital dual tuner for your media center, there are simpler, cheaper alternatives like the Hauppauge Nova-T 500.