Lifeview FlyTV Express X1

Two telly tuners on a single card that finally put your PCI-e bus to good use.

If you're on the hunt for a feature-heavy TV tuner card that packs support for both digital and analog telly broadcasts, this fella ought to fill that void nicely. What's more, it slips into the barren wasteland that is a PCI-Express x1 expansion slot.

Interestingly, this tuner can display up to four video streams at once, two from the television -- both of which can be configured for either digital or analogue signals -- and two others through composite and S-Video inputs.

The main software package has a refreshingly clean interface for a TV tuner, somewhat resembling a minimal version of Windows Media Player 10. All of your analog and digital TV stations and radio stations reside on the right hand side, much like a playlist, with the recording, time-shift, etc buttons at the bottom.

Overall, the software was quite responsive, unlike the myriad of poorly written tuner applications out there. That's not to say it didn't have its issues, though, as it would occasionally crash for no apparent reason. But this problem seemed to fix itself over time, leaving us wondering whether it was a case of PEBKAC. Overall, it was far more stable than most tuner software yours truly has played with.

In terms of tuning-in, it's entirely automated -- you need only select Australia and hit scan. To save you time in the future, especially if you're going to tag the stations with custom names, you can save your channel lists to files for importing in the future.

Picture-in-picture is quite well designed, with a completely resizable and movable box used as the overlay. Oddly enough, if you've activated FM support, it will also appear in its own blank PiP box.

For recording, video is saved as MPEG-2 with radio gulping up space with the WAV format. Scheduling recording sessions is easily managed, with once-off and weekly options available. Unfortunately, however, it seems you can only record one thing at a time, radio included.

The small hiccups aside, though, this is an uncomplicated, yet fully decked-out tuner that begs your wallet to spill coin.