Radio

The TV tuner card had a feature to play the radio on the laptop. This feature I found to be a big waste. The antenna is plugged in between the s-video port and the coaxial port. The antenna is supposed to allow the reception of the radio signal. The quality of sound from the radio had a lot of static and hardly picked up any of the radio stations. With the cablevision cable attached to the tuner card, I was expecting to be able to get better sound from the radio. This was not the case. The sound quality was still full of static. However, when I was able to get the radio going, I found that you were able to record the radio signal. The file type that the program recorded to was a WAV file. This was good except that it will eat up your hard drive space quickly. It would have been nice to record to a more compressed format like MP3.

Video Capture

Video capture was not too bad with this card. There was frame loss but most people would be okay with it. The capture software allows you to change many of the capture settings. This is good when trying to get the greatest quality video out of the video capture function. The video captured was saved as an MPEG 1,2 or 4 quality file. This is good when you want to create it as a VCD or DVD movie.

There was something we felt was a flaw in the program. The largest size that any file could be is 4GB. This becomes a problem when trying to capture a 2-hour movie. In addition to this, if you do not have your hard drive defragmented, the program will not auto start the next 4 GB file. This resulted in the program stopping the recording. In some cases, the program locked up. The end result of the video capture was very surprising. It was better then I had expected. I converted the captured file into a DVD movie. The settings I had set the recording to were DVD quality. The videotape I had was a second-generation videotape. When I viewed the DVD, the quality was a little pixellated but almost as good as the tape.

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