TV Tuners for Your PC

TiVo Without the TiVo

Pressing pause or a dedicated time-shift button on these devices makes them time-shift just like a TiVo; they buffer the signal using the PC's hard disk. Unfortunately, this process didn't always work smoothly. For instance, while all the programs paused briefly when we hit the time-shift button, a few of them imposed a longer delay before we could pause or rewind--and the ADS Tech delayed for a frustrating 10 seconds. In addition, video became choppy with the ADS card when we set the capture parameters to standard DVD resolution (720 by 480).

The next time we installed the Instant TV card, we encountered no such delay, but other problems persisted. With both the Instant TV card and the AVerMedia UltraTV USB 300, when we tried to record time-shifted video at high-quality encoding settings, the video image degraded markedly. MPEGs on the ADS played back smoothly, but the AVerMedia's files looked choppy. In both cases, the lower video quality during recording and time-shifting made watching TV more difficult, defeating the feature's purpose.

Both of these products rely on software to encode video, but so does the ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0, which did not suffer from image degradation. It played back perfectly regardless of quality settings, and it has jog and shuttle controls for moving back and forth through time-shifted video at varying speeds. Hauppauge's products didn't show any image- quality loss while recording time-shifted video either, though they did require us to wait before we could pause or rewind such video. Both Hauppauge tuners perform hardware-based encoding.

Recording video is more straightforward. In all cases, just pressing the record button on the external remote control or in the on-screen control panel starts the process. The Hauppauge WinTV software has a one-touch-recording (OTR) feature like those found on many VCRs; repeatedly pressing the button increases the recording time in 15-minute increments. ATI TV's OTR feature lets you preset how long it will record, but you can't adjust the increment length from the control panel.

Scheduling a recording is reminiscent of scheduling on a TiVo-style personal video recorder (PVR). Most of the tuners work with TitanTV.com, a Web site that provides TV listings; the only exception is the ADS card, which doesn't work with an electronic program guide (EPG). The ATI comes bundled with GuidePlus+ software, which is tightly integrated into the ATI Multimedia Center software suite; a preview window within the listings window lets you watch TV as you navigate the schedule. The TitanTV schedule has no preview window. GuidePlus+ also provides listings for U.S. and Canadian stations, while TitanTV is U.S.-only.

Scheduling a recording was simple with both EPGs, but GuidePlus+ let us move more easily between the schedule and our TV window. In GuidePlus+, clicking on a program while it's showing pulls the program up in ATI's TV viewing window; there's no similarly easy shortcut in the Hauppauge or AVerMedia PVR software. We limited our testing to the EPG included with each device, but other options exist, such as Beyond TV and SageTV.

The AVerMedia UltraTV USB 300 is the only TV tuner here that performs picture-in-picture, allowing you to watch both live TV and playback of recorded video simultaneously. (It doesn't display two channels of live TV at once, however.)

The Burning Question

All of the programs that are included with these tuners can record video as DVD- or VideoCD-compliant MPEG files, which makes the devices useful not only for archiving your favorite episodes of Smallville but also for burning video captured from a VCR or camcorder. In case you don't already have video-editing or DVD-burning software, some tuners are bundled with one or the other. The AVerMedia is the only one here that comes with both (Ulead VideoStudio 7 SE and DVD MovieFactory 2 SE), though Hauppauge's WinTV-PVR-150 does include an MPEG file splitter for trimming unwanted footage (that is, commercials). The ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 comes with neither editing nor DVD-burning software.