Hauppauge WinTV USB

As if TV wasn’t pervasive enough in society today we have now brought it to our computer screens as well. But In this little neat transparent plastic box we have the easiest solution to not missing your favourite programs.

Firstly installation, well take it out the box, plug it in the USB port, up pops windows telling you its spotted a new device, pop in the CD in and let software install. Then run one of two TV programs it gives you and it will tune its self in and your watching TV. That’s it; it takes 4 minutes at most.Well what are the other advantages of having a USB TV card over a PCI card? Well one you can use it with a laptop. No PCI slots taken up esp. useful for me as I had filled all of mine.

The card or rather a box really, sends its video down the USB but sound out put comes via a normal audio line out. It also has a line in for sound and s-video in (comes with adapter to composite video) for linking the card to a normal video camera. This can then be used as a web cam for instance.

The picture quality is ok at 320*240 and still quite watchable full screen. I’m not sure how this compares to other TV cards. The only thing that is slightly annoying is the fact the sound is only mono; fine for most programs but it does mean that doesn’t preserve the surround sound encoding in films for instance.You can record video to avi format if you wish however this is one of the shortcomings on my machine (P600) the sound and video part company fairly quickly. Although I have recently got around this, by using a program that syncs the sound with the video. You can get it here
http://www.virtualdub.org/download/Any other random facts I haven’t mentioned

• It comes with a teletext program
• It can decode cable channels (not sure how that would work as cable companies scramble most channels)
• It’s a nice blue/green colour
• It can take stills of TV programs
• It uses 500Ma basicly the full output from a usb port

That’s about it really. It’s a great buy for the gadget happy such as myself and the least hassle for the less technically minded. But you have to remember if you have the workspace available a 14” TV is only around £20 more.