VisionPlus VisionDTV USB-Ter

Kelvyn Taylor — 2004-11-04T13:07:22.000Z

Kelvyn Taylor, PC Magazine, Thursday 4 November 2004 at 13:07:22

A good-value digital TV tuner

The VisionDTV USB-Ter from Visionplus claims to be the world's first external digital TV tuner with Windows Hardware Quality Labs certification. In theory this should ensure good XP compatibility, and we found that it worked flawlessly when a good aerial signal was present, but poor signal strength led to random application freezes when trying to change channels.

The VisionDTV is a tiny silver box that connects via USB1.1 or 2. Power is delivered down the USB cable so you don't need a separate adapter; at 100mA, its needs are well below the 500mA rating of a standard USB port. The aerial connection is a standard 75ohm coaxial plug, but there's no external audio or video input capability.

Channel setup was simple using the automatic scan menu; you just set it to your geographic location and it will do the rest. It will detect freeto-air and scrambled channels, but there's no support for subscribing to such content (for example, via Top Up TV services).

You can edit channel names and add channels to a Favourites list, which usefully separates them into TV and audio channels, and if your soundcard has an S/PDIF output you can route the audio to it.

VisionTV is the clunky but functional software application included with the device. The VCR-style panel gives you access to programme controls, personal video recorder (PVR) and electronic programme guide (EPG) functions. It's not a particularly elegant interface, but it does the job.

Channels can be viewed and recorded in 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio and there's also a free-resize option. The one thing lacking is a title-free mode. You can hide the control and Favourites panels, but you can't get rid of the title bar in the video window.

A supplied infrared remote control replicates all program and navigation commands, usefully including the Enter and Tab keyboard buttons. It's also easy to control via a keyboard as all program functions have a shortcut key, but the listing for these is buried in the pdf manual.

Picture and audio quality were excellent, and the PVR system was a joy to use with easy scheduling; you can set schedules manually or via the EPG. You can also timeshift live TV. The record buffer defaults to five minutes but you can increase this, subject to available system resources.

Recordings are saved as multiplexed (.mpg) mpeg2 files, but the one downside of this product is that you can't adjust the recording quality settings. It's preset to record in a 'standard play' mpeg2 mode of about 3Mbytes/sec, which means that recordings aren't quite as high quality as the raw digital TV mpeg2 streams.

There's a 4GB file size limit (about two hours), and longer recordings are automatically spanned over multiple files in order to maintain compatibility with FAT32 file systems. Recorded content is saved in a list accessed from a button on the control panel, from where you can replay, rename or delete your recordings.

Despite this reservation, for the price it's an outstanding product. Cheaper than some rival USB Freeview TV tuners, it has as many, if not more, features.

AVerMedia AVerTV DVB-T PCI card

Paul Monckton — 2003-10-28T11:51:46.000Z

Paul Monckton, PC Magazine, Tuesday 28 October 2003 at 11:51:46

A great choice for a home-theatre PC.

If you want to bring your digital TV and VCR onto your computer screen and place the controls firmly within the grasp of your mouse, AVerMedia's AVerTV DVB-T PCI card could be the answer. It combines a TV tuner with personal video recorder (PVR) capability and delivers it to your desktop in an integrated software interface. What's more, it uses the new DVB-T digital broadcasting standard so you'll be able to watch or listen to all the freely available digital terrestrial TV and audio channels in high quality and record them to your hard disk.

Installation is simple enough for those who are used to getting their hands dirty inside their PCs, but the provided documentation is decidedly thin. There are diagrams to show you what goes where but you'd better hope nothing goes wrong, as there's no troubleshooting guide and the description of the software stops right after installation and initial setup. Unfortunately, we did have a little trouble - the TV image was somewhat jerky with break-ups in sound and vision. AVerMedia dealt with this problem swiftly by emailing us a new driver, although this isn't available on its Web site at the time of writing. We feel that the inexperienced user may become somewhat frustrated at the lack of printed help material.

Once installation is complete, you'll need to wait a few moments while the software performs an initial scan of the available channels and then you're up and running. Although you'll have to figure the software out for yourself, it's actually quite well-laid out and simple to use. From here, you can watch TV in a window or in full-screen mode, bring up a channel selector (which has the channel names automatically added), record TV direct to hard disk or schedule a programme to be recorded via integration with a third-party electronic programme guide (EPG) such as TVTV (www.tvtv.co.uk). The time-shift function allows you to pause the live TV program you're watching and then pick up where you left off.

Unfortunately, there's no support for any of the interactive features of digital television so there's no red button to press to join in with Big Brother, although EPG information such as Now and Next is promised soon. Teletext support is an optional extra but wasn't provided in our review sample. What you do get, however, is analogue composite and S-Video capture and a nice infrared remote control (batteries included). This makes it a great choice if you're building a home theatre PC, as other analogue sources such as those from external set-top boxes can be seamlessly integrated into the same interface.

The AVerTV DVB-T is attractively priced and offers some good features which are likely to be expanded as the software is further developed. It's a much better choice than an analogue alternative.

Contact: AVerMedia

www.averm.co.uk

Specifications:

System requirements Windows XP, ME 2000, 98 or SE
CPU 800MHz Pentium III
Memory 128MB
Hard disk space Lots, if you're going to record video
Graphics VGA card with DirectX 8.0 support and hardware overlay
Antenna UHF/VHF TV antenna
Sound card SoundBlaster 16 or better

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