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Originally published at Internet.comExploring the Wild Frontier of PC/TV Conversion
As any media-center or home-theater PC enthusiast knows, TV/computer convergence is a bit like a spaghetti Western. With little reliable how-to information available, PC builders find themselves venturing into grim, uncharted territory. Manuals are too often unfriendly, components oddly inoperable. Television content producers treat PC (or TiVo) users as cattle rustlers and claim jumpers.
And above everything looms the specter of $2,000 in computer hardware proving less useful than a $50 VCR or $5-a-month set-top box. Good audio and video capture can mean the difference between grainy, distorted recordings and the experience you expect from living-room components. A slipshod user interface can make recording and time-shifting TV as tough as setting a VCR clock.
It's with these requirements in mind that we looked at ADS Technology's Instant TV Deluxe USB, a media-center hardware and software combo with a list price of $199 (often discounted to around $170).
The Good
Instead of a PCI card inside your desktop, the Instant TV Deluxe uses an external USB 2.0 device to import audio and video from your TV, cable box, or other source. The unit can capture TV signals using a variety of connectors -- standard coaxial, S-Video, and RCA miniplug (stereo) jacks. In addition to watching TV on your PC monitor, you can pause or rewind live programming, skip commercials while viewing recorded shows, schedule recordings in advance, or save programs direct to your DVD burner instead of the hard disk.
The kit also ships with an infrared transceiver that, connected to a second USB port, both responds to the supplied remote control and communicates with your cable box or other tuning device -- letting you, say, set Instant TV to record a program on channel 8 at noon, then another on channel 5 an hour later. This "IR blaster" has a long cord, perfect for placing several feet away from your PC.
For the most part, the ADS Tech solution performs as advertised. Watching live TV on your monitor -- whether full-screen or in a window -- is no problem, and you're able to engage in TiVo-style time-shifting, pausing the show to get a snack and rewinding or fast-forwarding by moving a time marker along a shaded bar that indicates the amount of programming recorded.
Recording takes place transparently in the background, letting you work with other applications while the PC records your favorite show. Provided software promises to help you create professional-looking video DVDs complete with titles, menus, and chapters, while the kit ships with sufficiently long and reasonably high-quality coax and component cables to configure the system with ease.
But while the hardware seems flawless, things can change in the blink of an eye in the Wild West of PC convergence -- for every component or feature that's working fine, there's another that can go awry. And Instant TV Deluxe USB is no
The Bad
Glitches ambushed us like bandits as soon as we began installing the software: We experienced half a dozen crashes during setup of the core recording and playback software, SnapStream's BeyondTV 3.5 (which retails for $70 on its own). At one point, the system informed us that we had only Video for Windows (VFW) drivers and required Windows Driver Model (WDM) drivers, though moments earlier we'd installed all the Instant TV drivers and were running a clean Windows XP install. There seemed to be no workaround save patience and willingness to reinstall, restart, and reinstall again.
Instant TV ships with a second application for recording television called CapWiz, which offers the direct-to-disc recording BeyondTV doesn't. But despite our best efforts, CapWiz flatly refused to launch.
Once up and running, BeyondTV works well enough. It's not difficult to set up a recording, using TV listings from SnapStream's service (an additional $5 per month). The side-by-side image below shows the effect of default versus best-quality recording mode; the latter fills about 1GB of hard disk space per minute of video.
Another default setting displays video in overlay mode (video input outputted directly to your monitor via your graphics card's RAMDAC). We found TV in this mode a tad blocky and unrefined -- as the image below shows, a bit better with less bleeding when displaying text (the left half of the image), but for most scenes inferior to what's called 3D accelerated mode.
The latter lets your graphic card process the signal before it hits your screen. We judged it to have slightly higher quality overall, although we encountered another glitch getting it to work -- we had to take the unusual and undocumented step of manually rolling back a DirectX 9.0c DirectShow component (quartz.dll) to the DirectX 9.0b version.
It doesn't take the sight of a deadeye gunslinger to see that in any mode, TV signals in general look mediocre when displayed on a PC monitor -- the reason many home-theater buffs have opted to hook their Media Center PCs to a TV set. We also noticed slight image degradation and color loss in even the best-quality recording versus live TV (left versus right in the image below).
The Ugly
Our problems didn't end there. While we liked BeyondTV's menus and on-screen cues, which resemble cable TV's interactive program guides, the software has a number of minor user-interface problems. The Esc button exits from some menus, but not others -- before we learned the ropes, we found ourselves pressing Esc in the wrong menu and exiting live-TV mode altogether, then waiting an annoying five or ten seconds to re-enter it from the main menu. The unresponsive feel continues with a two- to five-second lag when changing channels.
Nor does BeyondTV have all the small touches that made TiVo a household name. If you're watching live TV while recording, then choose to change channels, TiVo begins recording anew from the new channel; BeyondTV forces you to answer a dialog box about whether you want to discard the recording you've made to that point.
A few glitches were true show-stoppers. Every fourth or fifth time we launched live TV, a squeal of static erupted from our stereo TV speakers. About as often, sound became distorted, warbling like an Ennio Morrricone soundtrack with a delay between right and left channels. Nothing seemed to help except restarting the TV. And occasionally, clicking Windows XP's maximize button to enlarge a windowed TV screen resulted in a frozen, mangled image with no way out except terminating the program.
The ArcSoft Showtime DVD-burning software proved as user-friendly as a cranky old mule, with an awkward mess of menus, tabs, options, and features -- sometimes double-clicking your DVD title enables you to edit it, sometimes not; sometimes dragging a clip into the video timeline adds it at the insertion point, sometimes not. The program's menu templates and introductory animations are handsome, but it takes too long to use them. And Showtime balked at burning a video project directly to DVD; we had to save our output to the hard disk, then use a separate program to create the DVD.
Closing Credits
Is Instant TV Deluxe USB worth your fistful of dollars? Well, except possibly for the included remote's having more buttons than the software can use, the hardware is a delight: It installs quickly, and Win XP even recognizes the TV recorder and can configure its drivers automatically.
But as happens too often in PC dramas, well-designed hardware is saddled with frustrating software, with CapWiz refusing to work and BeyondTV's robust capture and playback marred by difficult installation and bothersome quirks. And the custom-DVD-creation software is feature-packed, but dauntingly complex. Instant TV Deluxe is a solid performer, but you'll have to tame its learning curve before you can ride off into the sunset.
Christopher Saunders is managing editor of SysOpt.com
Author: Christopher Saunders
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