Compro VideoMate T100The VideoMate T100 is a low profile PCI TV tuner which provides HDTV free-to-air TV reception.
The card sports a silicon digital TV tuner with a Philips 9-bit ADC chip. It supports SDTV and HDTV up to and including 1080i. The card itself has three connectors – an I-type DVB-T input, an S-Video connector and an IR receiver connector for the bundled IR receiver.
The T100 can capture video via the S-Video connector, using either an S-Video or composite video cable, neither of which are included. The card can capture from NTSC or PAL sources – it captures DVD at 3GB/hr, SVCD and 1GB/hr and VCD and 600MB/hr. Video capture formats available are MPEG-1/2 and 4, and the capture process supports pausing during recording and automatic split file size.
The capture features also allow timeshifting and still frame capture.
It supports PIP/POP with up to four screens running simultaneously (main window plus 3 subwindows) and you can set the TV screen to be the desktop wallpaper (although that might send your head spinning!). Each channel is customisable in terms of brightness, hue and resolution.
Minimum system requirements to operate the card and software are a 1.2GHz CPU for SDTV viewing up to a 2.4GHz CPU for HDTV and PIP/POP, 128 MB RAM, 50MB hard drive space, onboard/expansion sound card, GPU with DirectX9.0 support and Windows 2000/XP.
The bundle includes the card itself, installation CD which contains ComproDTV2, ComproDVD2 Ulead PhotoExplorer 8.5SE, drivers and manuals, a Start-Up Guide, IR remote control with batteries and an IR receiver cable. You can get a low profile riser for the card, but the box we received didn’t include it.
