AVerMedia AVerTV Cardbus Review (AMTVC)
The AMTVC is a TV tuner for all Cardbus enabled notebook computers. With this product one can watch cable or over the air television on his or her laptop computer. This card does pretty much everything that any other TV tuner on the market does: it can input video from composite and s-video sources, present stereo audio, capture audio and video, and even time-shift.
Physically the card is built well and sticks out from the computer about 2 inches, and around 3 inches with the input dongle attached. The input dongle has connections for stereo audio (the red and white cables), composite video (the yellow cable) and s-video (the black cable). Next to the video input dongle is the coaxial cable input. Instead of screwing the coax cable directly into the card, a flexible extender/adaptor is included.
To view the TV source Avermedia supplies the AverTV program. This program is quite powerful, but quite confusing. This confusion is brought about be the tiny buttons with random icon drawn on them. Even after a month of using the software I still resort to laying the cursor over the button to see what it does. Aside from the rather poor interface, AVerTV is quite a potent program. For instance one can fine tune each channel to get the optimal picture quality. Also user adjustable is brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, and sharpness. One quark of the program is that in full screen mode the video takes up the full screen – no black bars no matter what the aspect ratio is on your monitor. For some this is great, but for the videophiles out there this is an atrocity.
Confused yet?
For recording Avermedia supplies MPEG 1 and MPEG 2. One can also download Divx, Xvid, or any other codec and use that instead. The quality of all these recordings, as far a cable quality goes, is fantastic.
A neat feature of AverTV is timeshift. Timeshift gives your computer a sort of Tivo like capability. However, unlike Tivo where it automatically enables time-shift, in AverTV the user must manually click on the time-shift button. After enabling this feature one can pause and rewind TV. For me it is more of a novelty than a necessity like recording. And unlike recording, time-shift is only possible using the MPEG1 and MPEG2 codecs.
One reason I decided to purchase a cardbus TV tuner over a USB one was because of my PlayStation 2. I wanted to play PS2 games on my huge 17’’ computer monitor without lag. Using the provided AverTV one will occur around a half a second of lag. However, using a program called ChrisTV there is next to no lag while playing video games. One small problem I have with ChrisTV is that it does not interpolate (I think this is the correct term) the video so everything will look pixilated. And as a side note if you want to play video games on a computer screen get an s-video cable. The picture looks a million times better compared to the archaic composite connection.
S-video Connection on GranTurismo 3
Composite Connection on GranTurismo 3
Pros
-Inexpensive at less than $100
-Great features
-Time-shift
-Compact
Cons
-It gets HOT
-It uses 1 amp of electricity (not good for your battery life)
-User interface is quirky
-Distorts aspect ratio on non 4:3 screens
-The mouse wheel controls the channel switcher and cannot be disabled
Overall it is a great product. If you have a laptop and are in the market for a TV tuner this is the way to go. Check it out here http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814100015
