Turns your PC into a Freeview Personal Video Recorder
Disadvantages:
Not all PCs suited to siting in lounge
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
I've revisited my review of the Nebula PC TV card, because, true to their word, Nebula haven't sat back and let developments pass them by. Since buying the card, trials of Hi-Definition digital TV have started on terrestrial TV. The format has been available for several months on Sky satellite , but as you can imagine, at a cost.
This is the first time that Hi-Definition TV has been made available on Freeview, although the vast majority of set-top boxes couldn't cope with it even if they could tune into it.
Currently, it's only being trialled on London's (what a surprise) Crystal Palace transmitter, but this is so powerful ,and the region so densely populated that it represents a huge chunk of the viewing population.
Anyway, I'll shut up now and place my actual revision at the end.
Being able to watch live TV on your PC, and record it, has been with us for some time. Internal adapter cards like the WinTV from Hauppauge come to mind, and there are several other makers in this multi-media field. Quite often, these cards also serve as screen-capture interfaces to enable, for example, an analogue camcorder to be attached.
Where the market is decidedly more limited is in the field of DIGITAL TV. For one thing, you’re unlikely to find a BskyB digital satellite card for a PC – the specification and format of a Sky set-top box is jealously policed by them, and licensed to a handful of makers. I did find one free-to-air satellite card by Aver, but it wasn’t specific about which satellite it should be pointed at – there are others, despite what ‘Murdocchio' would prefer you to believe.
Trying to find a card capable of receiving Freeview is not much more yielding, but you do at least find a few cards if you search Google for such things as ‘Freeview PC card’.
One such is the Nebula Electronics DigiTV Card. Made in Kent by a small firm, it really is an excellent bit of kit. Costing £80 odd , it has to be said that it’s quite expensive compared to even the high-end set-top boxes (STBs) for Freeview, the Sony for example. However, it is difficult and unfair to make such comparisons since this card enables several features not available in your average STB.
For one thing, because it’s in a PC, it can record programmes, timed or otherwise, to hard disk; the overall capacity being limited by your own disk space available.
Then, of course, if you’ve also got a DVD-Rewriter in your PC, it can make a permanent recording of programmes ‘you want to keep’. There are currently some complications with this, which I’ll touch on later.
Initially, when I wrote this, the Nebula card had stolen a march on the other Freeview solutions by introducing an Electronic Programme Guide of their own, downloaded from the Internet – the problem with other receiving kit at the time was that you could either only get the ‘Now & Next’ facility, or if you were really lucky, and in an area where a trial was being carried out, a programme guide stretching a whole 4 days into the future – heady stuff. Nowadays, a full 8-day EPG is available to any set top box that will listen (old OnDigital boxes won’t ever be upgraded to receive this), so it seems that Nebula are phasing out this facility. Certainly, my card now seems to be always up to date without ever needing the download.
WHAT YOU GET
The packaging is very satisfactory, and even the foam used is that nice slick stuff – no squeaky noises from blown-foam to set your teeth on edge. Inside, you get, obviously, the card and a remote sensor to plug into it, to be placed later in the line of sight of the remote control that also comes in this package. The remote is one of those learning versions from OneForAll (model URC7544) and is capable of controlling this card (under the subterfuge of using the controls intended for a VCR*), the TV, a satellite box and a DVD player. I really MUST try to use this as a means of getting rid of some of the burgeoning stock of remotes now threatening to collapse the arm of the sofa. There has been no attempt by Nebula to ‘badge-engineer’ the OneForAll remote.
*(Warning – if you intend to keep a Sony brand VCR going alongside this set-up, you could run into problems as the OneForAll code used by Nebula to control their card is the same as that for a Sony VCR.) Of course, with one of these in the PC, what do you want a VCR for?
Combined with all this comes the latest version of Nebula’s software, which can be checked against their web-site for a later version.
INSTALLATION
Basically, you have very little to do, and anyone familiar with installing, say, an internal modem, will have no problem at all. Simply locate a spare PCI slot, push the card into place, and screw it down as per the other cards. Plug in a TV aerial (antenna) and the remote sensor - now you’re ready to roll.
On first reboot, the card is detected (in my case by Windows XP Pro). Then you install its drivers, followed by Nebula’s suite of software from the CD-ROM supplied.
With first use, this immediately goes in search of digital channels – you do need to do some groundwork (preferably in advance) here, like finding out whether your area is covered by Freeview. Coverage is spreading, yea, even unto the valley in North Wales where we stayed a few weeks ago. You may find you need a better aerial even in a coverage area, but this is true for the medium as a whole, not just this card.
WATCHING TV (OH, YES AND LISTENING TO THE RADIO)
Despite being part of a common numbering range, the radio channels can be kept completely separate, which is useful. Watching TV is merely a matter of launching the software, choosing a channel with the remote control (or mouse), selecting ‘windowed’ or full-screen and getting on with it. Of course, with radio, you can even run it minimised, since there's very little to see except a kind of 'test card' information page.
TIME-SHIFTING TV (AND RADIO)
You can set up a timed programme in two ways. One is to use the weekly listing (EPG) that you have already stored – you scan through this and click on the programmes that you want, it’s as easy as that. Likewise, you can set up a timer manually, for something maybe more than a week away – useful for those two-week holidays, but slightly inferior to the Sky offering which frequently allows you to add a ‘serial link’ to regular programme timings. Having said that, the Sky EPG doesn’t allow for adjustments to take into account late running programmes and the like – this one does. This EPG does however allow for multiple occurences of the programme but I'm not sure what happens if you select a programme that then gets cancelled.
Radio programmes can be set to download as .mp2 files, rather than a blank video file, mpeg2 for instance. This means that they take up less room and can be recorded to a CD-R rather than the somewhat dearer DVD-R.
With my original software version (3.11 Build 3), the mp2 files were incompatible with players such as Winamp and MS Media Player, being laced with a whole series of clicks and pops along with the real sound track. I e-mailed Nebula, and got a very comprehensive reply, assuring me that this was being looked into already and would be addressed in a alter software build.
True to their word, the latest software versions (I’m now at v 3.12.8) allow for compatible sound files, and will even record vision to disk in a DVD-format, ready to be authored and edited prior to burning to a DVD-R
CONTROLLING IT
Most of the ‘transport’ functions, i.e. play, record, change channel etc. can be carried out from the OneForAll remote control, and even the Menu button gives access to the EPG and timer (and settings/preferences) This ought to be plenty for most couch potatoes. One thing you can’t do with the remote is multi-task – i.e. you can’t do anything else with the PC but use it as a TV/recorder. Other functions, which involve using software, are best left to a keyboard and mouse.
I would suggest that these should be cordless, either normal cordless or Bluetooth. In general, the mouse alone can carry out the vast majority of activities, so you wouldn’t have to sit with a keyboard on your lap. I found it a little strange to start with, being able to use a PC from the couch. With the addition of a wireless LAN link, I COULD surf, handle e-mail and download the EPG directly from there. Make sure that your cordless devices will ‘stretch that far’ viz-a-viz transmitting between PC and couch! The only major problem this new flexibility gives is that a TV screen is normally nowhere near clear enough to read small text, and finding your way around menus is more a matter going from memory and the apparent length of the words! Unfortunately, a large flat screen with the definition suited to PC use would cost a fortune, but no doubt they’re coming. Sony is making such claims for their new Wega range.
NIFTY BITS
A) PICTURE QUALITY - The TV picture quality is every bit as good in sharpness as from my Sony stand-alone box, which has in itself received accolades for its quality, but part of the credit for this goes to the fact that my graphics card also has a proper S-Video output specifically for ‘driving’ a TV. Picture quality on an 800x600 PC monitor is even better than TV, but unless you want ‘TV while you work’, it’s hardly a suitable situation for family viewing.
Besides, I’ve a 16:9 TV, which can take advantage of Freeview’s native wide screen format whereas my 4:3 monitor renders this as the usual ‘band across the middle’ with stripes top and bottom. You CAN specify a 4:3 format to fill the monitor screen, but you lose one of digital TV’s main attractions like that. Incidentally, sound is fed via an optical link from my sound card to my Yamaha Digital Surround tuner/amplifier – this gives me true 5.1 channel sound when watching a DVD and stereo from the TV. It also goes without saying that any analogue sound card can produce stereo at the very least. My only reservation is that there seems to be a discernible jerkiness to the depiction of movement – it not too distressing, rather like sitting too close to the screen at the cinema, but it has to be said that it’s not quite up to the usual standard of a standalone STB or digital TV. Maybe I need a faster PC to process the incoming data stream (or maybe not, if my wife is reading this).
B) TIME SHIFTING - The 8-day EPG is a huge improvement over that ‘Now & Next’ nonsense. The timer section can hold 50 timed listings, which is somewhat better than your average VCR’s 10 or so. It also allows for generic searches of all programmes containing certain words in their title, making the finding of all episodes of Eastenders well easy, wivart ‘avin’ ter say ‘wass garn on?’ once. It’s not clever enough to handle questions like ‘anyone seen Phil?’ though.
C) PLAYBACK - Recordings are indiscernible from live pictures, thanks to the incoming MPEG2 format being immediately playable in most suites of Media or DVD playing software. The playback software even allows for 'screen capture' (you can pause it first to get the best shot). As an example, I've done this below after converting Nebula’s .bmp format to a couple of .jpg files for upload to Ciao.
D) SHARING - If you run a home network, then the Nebula software allows for a client/server set-up, whereby the machine with the TV card becomes a server, and the client is given the same access to watching live TV, changing channels, and setting timers. This only works well without data loss, if your LAN is either hardwired or a faster wireless set-up, preferably ‘wireless G’, and not too far from the wireless access point, which would lessen the transmission rate. Be prepared for indignant howls from elsewhere in the house along the lines of ‘Oi, who just changed the channel – I was watching that!’ To be honest, I've gone little further than test this facility - the wireless part of my LAN doesn't seem fast enough for the 'far end' to even detect the server before the search times-out, and the other hard-wired PC will work, but the picture stutters and hesitates. This is probably down my 'second best' PC being below the brink of the 'system requirements' as stated by Nebula.
E) KISS THE DOG GOODBYE – No, not your pooch, but the ‘Digital On-Screen Graphic’, aka those annoying Station Badges that have proliferated with digital TV. The Nebula software allows for the smudging or even covering over of these logos.
Unfortunately, you can’t depend on them always being in the same place, even on the same channel. For example, BBC 4 carries a lot of ancient 4:3 format programming, with the ‘DOG’ placed about one third of the way across a wide-screen TV’s screen. This reverts to being about one sixth of the distance on a true wide-screen picture.
F) PAUSING LIVE TV – Yes, this isn’t the only bit of kit claiming to be able to do this, but if you are interrupted whilst watching live TV, you can hit the pause button and come back any time in the next 30 minutes to take up where you left off. This tends to be the case with any machine writing to some kind of re-writable disk, in this case, your hard drive.
G) ONE (OR EIGHT) AT A TIME PLEASE - As with any single tuner STB, you can only watch/record one thing at a time, BUT with one remarkable exception - unlike analogue TV, Freeview digital channels do not have unique radio frequencies, in fact the vast majority of the BBC’s stations are shoe-horned into one channel. This means that, in theory, you can record the content of up to, say, eight channels in one go. This could be very useful if you want to record clashing programmes on Beebs One and Two simultaneously.
Of course, this indiscriminate recording method gobbles up disk space at eight times the normal speed, but I can see when it might occasionally be of use. To invoke this recording method, you alter the record settings to record 'transport stream' .ts files. These can be played back as per normal, and you can even change channels whilst watching them as if it was live. The icing on the cake is that you can split out the programmes that clash and send them individually to disk as separate recordings. I guess you'd only bother with this final stage if you wanted to make a DVD of one or either of them.
B) ARCHIVING - At the first time of writing, you couldn't directly transfer the digital format of your hard disk TV recording to a (re)writable DVD and still expect a household DVD player to accept the disk. To save the added complication of using some conversion software, this was addressed in a later version of Nebula’s own software, allowing for the mpeg format used on hard disk to be made compatible with a DVD player’s needs.
Incidentally, Nebula Electronics are very quick to answer technical questions by e-mail, and I’ve always been left with the impression that the e-mail was specifically written back to me, rather than some ‘paste-up’ from an FAQ document lying around somewhere at their office.
At the moment, I am still able to make a DVD of a programme using Ulead Videostudio 7 (intended chiefly for camcorders) as an intermediary, and this would in fact allow me to trim the programme to the right length and edit out commercials on something that I really wanted to keep.
‘Something I want to keep’ – now there’s a little-explored phenomenon!
As a test, I've also used the facility to make an SVCD as opposed to a DVD. The results with the former are somewhat 'blocky' when rapid action takes place - no doubt it would be as good as DVD if you recorded a test card if you could find one, or maybe some nocturnal live (?) Big Brother. Frankly, I can buy DVD-Rs for around 30p now, so the 15p saved by using CD-Rs is hardly worth it. Incidentally, the Nebula card allows you to generate a test card, but there's no prepubescent girl with balloons and teddy bear, just boring old circles and lines!
CAVEATS
A) To USB OR NOT TO USB, THAT IS THE QUESTION - If your PC is to form part of an aerial lead ‘daisy-chain’, just like a home VCR would, then it needs to be left running, otherwise the pass-through of the signal to your TV for everyday watching will be severely downgraded when the PC is turned off. Nebula’s solution to this is to buy the USB external version of the card, which maintains its own power*. This would also be a suitable solution for laptop owners unable to install a typical PCI card. Fortunately, my digital TV has an ‘antenna-out’ socket doing nothing at the moment, making it easy to ensure that the PC is on the end of the line, not in the middle of it.
*Some PC s can be set to switch back on, if any USB activity is detected, which would also mean that you can leave it turned off between timer settings. Of course, if it’s slow to boot up, you could miss the start of something important and you’d need to get rid of any password-controlled log-ons, otherwise it will just sit there, like a puppy, waiting for you to come home.
B) NO SMART CARD (YET) - There is yet to be any provision for the new TopUpTV offering, which has annoyingly reappeared after everyone was ASSURED that there would be NO subscription element to digital terrestrial TV. The Nebula website recently carried out a straw poll to gauge potential demand for an adapter to hold and read a ‘smart card’, the findings of which were 80-odd % in favour of the add-on facility. Nebula are now looking at the best way to provide this facility.
C) THE WEAKEST LINK - The average 625-line TV screen is not particularly suited to ‘driving’ Windows; the definition, even at S-Video quality isn’t quite up to reading e-mails in a small font, but once your watching ‘telly’ or a DVD, it’s fine. Of course, this is nothing to do with the Nebula card, but a facet of using an everyday TV as a PC monitor.
D) ‘SYS REQS’ - Your PC needs to be at least a Pentium III running at 800mhz with 64 mbytes of RAM - this explains why one of my PCs will detect the server but produces a jerky picture - it's Pentium III, 500 mhz!
CONCLUSION
It’s difficult to talk about a TV Tuner card without making at least a passing mention of the needs of a Media Centre PC. Bear in mind that if this monster is to sit in the lounge, it needs to be quiet – having enough screaming fans to raise a hovercraft just won’t do. A site like www.quietpc.com is invaluable as a source of ‘hushed’ bits, fans, power units etc. and as I’ve written elsewhere, changing a small diameter fan for a larger one makes one hell of a difference. The cooling fan placed over your CPU (Pentium chip, what-have-you) is usually a small diameter ‘screamer’, well overdue for a makeover, noise-wise. QuietPC.com even supply cases that look like hi-fi; black, champagne or silver with those silver tubular feet, which seem to be de rigueur in audio equipment.
Once I’ve got my machine doing what I want, and LOOKING like a certain other person wants, then I’ll shift it to the lounge permanently. After all, I can claw back the space by replacing a VCR, a set-top box, a CD player and the DVD player all in one go. I can feel a trip to e-bay (or is it the dump?) coming on.
You can actually buy a Media Centre PC with Freeview tuner, DVD-writer and wireless LAN access but at around a grand for the main box, (you supply the screen) I think I’ll stick to the stealth approach of upgrading what I’ve got!
Finally, I notice that Nebula like what I've written enough to provide a link from their front page to my opinion - I wondered why the non-member reads were starting to 'take off'!
Having had cause to re-install the card, and retune it after a hard drive crash, I noticed that it had added a BBC HD channel to its list. You may already be aware of this if you've been into a big Tescos lately and looked at their 'wall' of flat screen TVs all seemingly playing a loop of BBC HD demo programmes. These are actually being fed by Sky satellite receivers. HD via your aerial is much more in its infancy, i.e. only to be seen in London at the moment, and then only in demo mode, that is to say a tedious carousel of clips from recent drama shot in HD.
A visit to the Nebula site whetted my appetite when I noticed that the latest version of their software included the HD function, so never one to hang back, I downloaded it and installed it.
Lo and behold, I could now see the HD demo channel in glorious but jerky sharpness. Freeze-frames and screen captures do however bring home just how sharp this new format is.
The other oddity is that it kept cutting me off - had I noticed that it was always after one minute, I'd have resolved the problem more quickly. Another visit to the Nebula site revealed that viewing HDTV required the use of a newly patented 'Codec' (coder-decoder) firmware that I was not licensed to use beyond one minute chunks.
Two minutes and £14.99 later, I WAS licensed to use it, although it's still jerky. This won't be resolved until I upgrade my PC and/or my graphics card, but it's an interesting development nonetheless, especially since everyone I've talked to doesn't even believe that the transmissions exist!
