Review of AverTV Cardbus TV Tuner

After getting fustrated with the lack of use of my Pinnacle TV tuner, I decided to try another brand, after reading a lot of boards, the AverTV Cardbus (E500) seemed to be one of the better cards on the market. After browsing the web I settled on a company called Provantage for buying it (a lot of places seem to be out of stock?)(http://www.provantage.com/pr_97873.htm)

Order was quick and painless, and in a few days the package arrived, shiny and new in my apartment.

Day 1: After ripping the packing open (the way one does) pulling out all the bits (which where all there) I quickly browsed the quick install guide, slotted the card into my PC, installed the drivers, and tried to install the software. Tried is the operative word, it wouldn't install, it kept going through most of the installation, and then just stopping (and when it stopped it deleted everything it seemed to have installed). I fired up the Aver website, used the Support link (http://support.aver.com/) and fired off a message.

Day 2: Recieved a message back from Aver techs to try uninstalling everything and reinstalling the latest versions of the software from their website, to no avail, so I e-mailed them all the programs I was running, and they immediately identified Pinnacle Studio as the offending program, which unfortunately to properly clean off the PC requires a complete reinstall of everything (joy).

Day 3: After formating and reinstalling my entire system, software for the AverTV card installed without any issues, plugged the antenna into my AverTV card, and was almost immediately watching TV, it was FANTASTIC! Changing channels worked, the program didn't seem to lock up, I didn't get any garbled error messages, none of the problems I'd noticed with the Pinnacle PCTV system manifested. Onto the second test, recording! Since I'm a big Stargate fan and have just gotten Sci-Fi channel I thought it would be nice to record the latest season and watch it as and when I want. So I tried a few recordings, hmm, the recording seems to stop after around 2 minutes (between two and three) another e-mail to AverTV support forum to see what's going on.

Day 4: Response from AverTV forum, is to check a few settings and make sure to disable the Virus Checker and Firewalls, since I can't have both my network card and the AverTV card in my PC at the same time, this isn't an issue, disable both, tweak the settings, and set it to record, lo and behold 30 minutes later I have a complete episode of Whose Line is it anyway waiting on my hard drive.

For the final test, I plugged my PS2 into the composite ports, fully expecting the horrible lag I had experienced with it on the Pinnacle device, and to my surprise, little to no lag. I played through a few rounds of SSX Tricky, with absolutely no problems, it seemed very responsive to my control so I was able to navigate down the mountain without hitting anything and get gold both in the racing and in the tricks games.

Perfect, now I can play with my PS2 even if I don't have a TV.

Overall I'm totally impressed, both with the quality of the product and with the level of support offered by AverTV. It never took more than 1 business day for the support techs to get back to me, and they always seemed to provide very good ideas about how to solve the issue that I was having.


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thanks for the review.

 

This uses a software encoder right? Is the recorded content smooth or does it stutter in places?