John Gillooly gets PVR/TV on your PC USB.
With everyone crowing about moving the PC closer to the television, logic dictates that TV tuners are an evolutionary dead end. I mean, why fork out cash for a tuner that plugs into a PC that is hooked up to a TV? The answer is actually pretty compelling, namely, TV tuners allow us to record direct to our hard disks thanks to associated Personal Video Recorder (PVR) software packages.
Compros VideoMate Live USB 2.0 is a nicely featured little product, using USB 2.0 and a hardware MPEG2 encoder to make PVR functions a reality and adding to that, video-in. All of this is then packed into a sleek little external box with IR remote control. Unfortunately it does require external power, sucking down more juice than that which would be supplied over the USB link.
A big part of a TV tuner is the quality of the software that runs it, and ensuring that you have the latest drivers and patches is a must. We grabbed these from Compro's website and had little trouble getting the box up and running, and only a short while later we were recording live TV. We did have trouble getting the timeshifting functions working, but everything else went smoothly.
Besides TV, the box also has an S-Video and headphone jack audio line in, allowing you to record from another source, while still displaying on the television. It is a handy function, especially for those who lack a VIVO graphics card.
Overall image quality is good, but not outstanding. There are a variety of MPEG2 settings that you can use for recording, but it is a shame that the more storage capacity friendly MPEG4 format is not supported. We did experience occasional instability when shutting down the software, but generally it worked well when controlled by either the mouse or remote control.
While the Compro VideoMate Live does well, it isn't outstanding. The combination of TV tuner, MPEG2 encoding and video input is damn handy. However, there are now TV tuners on the market at a similar price point that do similar things using the superior digital television signals (which makes for a much sexier quality of recordings) that are being broadcast side by side with analog in Australian capital cities.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012