After several days googling as much information as I could find on TV tuners I decided a dual tuner hybrid had all the things I wanted and would want for a while to come. I wanted to move to digital and high definition but as I wasn't sure what was available I did not want to be stuck with a limited range of channels
The tuner was ordered online from Skycomp Technology's website. They are based in Sydney and have been used for the last few computer hardware buys I have made. They deliver quickly and without fuss. Their site is easy to use and I have never felt anything less than confident using them. Questions about sales and deliveries are always answered promptly which I appreciate.
Hardware Installation: A monkey could do it! There is nothing to it at all. I turned the power to the computer off at the powerpoint but left it plugged in. Undid the four screws that open the side of the tower. Laid the tower on its side and cleared a space among the covers by removing one that protected the PCI-E slot.
The card slips into place without a problem and after being pressed into the motherboard slot is held by a screw. There are a couple of cables which can be plugged in at the rear outside now including antenna, remote and the s-video composite cable. No problem at all.
Software Installation. Not quite a job for a monkey but the software loaded quickly on my machine and I was able to get things running in a few minutes. There are still things I don't understand but the software is set up to be intuitive to use and the help section is very well written
The software is friendly and you can watch some digital tv in the background while you study the help menu after the initial set-up. You can set the tuners up to analog and digital or just digital and watch and record at the same time. It is really quite a good system. The digital setup auto-scans and picks everything up well.
I have signal amplifiers on the antenna cable and picked up signals from Sydney to Newcastle. There were several variations of each channel and one complaint I have was that when I was configuring the software to skip some channels the interface kept dropping it's position and going back to the first few channels to be shown in the box. Very annoying having to scroll through all those entries so many times but not a deal-breaker.
I have not been able to get ABC but that is not the card's fault. In my system there is a lag time of up to ten seconds during some frequency changes. I do not know if that is the card or the slow RAM I have but I have seen it mentioned elsewhere.
I like this unit. I don't know if there are better cards about but it works well and has been easy to install, set-up and use. I am on the fringes here and using a shared antenna in duplex housing which is not made or tuned to be used with digital tv so a couple of problems with pixelation and other image problems on some channels are not going to be dwelt upon now as the signals from the local towers are perfect. (except, as I said, no ABC! This is where I pat myself on the back for getting a hybrid because I also have analog tv and the ABC is alive and well there...mostly...apart from ABC2)
The FM radio worked well
I might cover a little more when I have watched some tv and seen how the other functions work. This far in it looks great!
Specification: Input Signal-75ohm TV. S-Video. Composite (RCA). Stereo Audio in (L/R) Remote Sensor
TV and FM Radio:
Watch and record Worldwide Analog and Digital programs.
Listen and record live FM radio
Multiple tuner cards support.
Picture-in-picture (PIP)/ Picture-by-picture (PBP) setting.
Transparent teletext overlays on the screen
Customized color adjustment\
Complete channel scan capability.
Record Videos in M-PEG 1-2/4 format.
Video/Music:
Media files management by date name or format.
Access your digital music library and play it as background music
Picture: Digital photos with stylish slideshow effect and background music.
My System:
XP with Service Pack 3
AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core Processor 4800+ 2.5GHz processor with 2GB of RAM.
Between the built-in VGA on the motherboard and the Radeon X1550 256MB graphics card I have about 500MB of graphics power
System Requirements:
For Time-Shift and record in M-PEG 2....
Pentium 4-2.6Ghz with HT (Hyper Threading)
AMD Athlon XP 2600+
128MB VGA Card with Directx 9.0 or above.
512MB of RAM or above.
PCI Express Slot
Sound Card (mine is built into the motherboard...seems to work so far)
Windows XP Home or Pro.
200MB hard-disk free space or more
For Dual Tuners Recording:
Pentium 4 3.0GHz with HT (Hyper Threading)
AMD Athlon XP 3000+
1GB RAM
Make sure you read the updates at the bottom of the page
Several Months later the tuner is working flawlessly as is the remote which was packaged with it.
The remote has small type on some buttons which can be difficult but it glows in the dark and the basic controls are easy to find and use.
One thing I hate about the software is the way the menus don't scroll. It requires individual clicks for each move up or down and when you have clicked on something in the menu it resets back to the start meaning you have to click all the way back to wherever you were rather than it being set-up at the place you left off. It is annoying!
The radio works, the record and play as well as the music player are flawless if you do not include having the non-scrolling menus. The way I set up the tuners with one as analog and one as digital means I cannot have PiP or watch one, record one but its easily fixed when analog is tuned out and it's set back to digital.
If there is a problem it happens when the house is hotter then 40C. The tuners switch off and cannot be used until they have cooled. They are invisible to the machine and the software. It may also mean retuning the whole setup which is fun the first time but less so as it happens again and again in summer. I have taken to using ice packs in water in a lunch box on the top of tower to keep all the internals a bit cooler. It is working so far