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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.
See also:
All Video and TV Cards
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