TV Tuner

With the card setup properly, it was time to watch TV. I clicked on the TV icon and right away the TV software program opened up for us.

The picture was not bad looking and seemed to move along fairly smooth. So far I was happy with what I saw. As I played with the remote and started to change channels, I started to notice that the picture was not synchronized to the sound. The longer I watched the TV show, the more noticeable the synchronization problem became. This synchronization problem was worse when you placed the TV program screen into full screen mode. The picture quality was slightly reduced and at times became pixellated.

I found a fix to the synchronization problem with the TV tuner, however, it is really kind of a hack. By recording the TV show first, sound and video was finally synchronized. I tried switching from full screen to the windowed screen, and it seemed to be fine in either case. In addition to doing this, it is important to defragment the hard drive as often as possible. A defragmented hard drive will make your computer run faster overall, especially with the large recordings that the tuner will fill your drive with.

The TV tuner interface is nicely designed. It allowed can be easily controlled by using the mouse.

Channel controls, volume, input selection and time shifting can all be easily activated from this control. The easy to understand symbols will make it to make any changes to the program. The TV tuner creates the recorded program in MPEG 4, 2 or 1 format. This is good as it allows most media players to replay the recorded program rather than having to use proprietary software. Depending on the format chosen, you can have quite good results while maintaining a smaller file size.

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