SUMMARY: Have you ever imagined the idea of being able to watch TV or listen to radio on your PC? Follow thy link as Jon Albiez takes a look at the Prolink Pixelview PlayTV Pro TV tuner card.
- TV Installation This couldn’t be any simpler. Install the card in a spare PCI slot, and Windows 98 SE does the rest. The audio and video modules share an IRQ, but this doesn’t impact on performance when capturing video. Plug and Play detects a Brooktree Fusion/Audio Capture Device and a Brooktree Fusion/Video Capture Device. After this, install the Pixelview Station utility. This nifty software utility provides a slick interface for the end user, and is very stable - I had no crashes during its use.
Reboot at the end of setup, and all is done. Simply fire up Pixelview Station TV and a wizard will ask you to select your country (this is in order to set the TV standard - Australia uses PAL-B), language, system chipset and VGA card. My GeForce2 MX was correctly detected, although my i815E chipset came up as "Unknown". After a momentary delay, a TV window appears and an option box asks "Do you want to scan for TV channels after installation?" Select "yes" and the software automatically scans for channels between 0 - 125. This process takes a few minutes, but produces a list of found channels when complete. The card picked up 4 VHF stations (ABC, Channel 7, Channel 9, Channel 10) and 2 UHF stations (SBS and BRIZ 31).
- FM Installation For the FM Tuner, just run Pixelview Station FM, and after a brief pause, the default frequency of 100MHz is displayed. Using either the remote or the onscreen utility, simply select the frequency you would like - that’s it. The autoscan facility picked up all 10 FM stations in my area effortlessly using the bundled antenna.
- Video Capture Installation Using the included Pixelview Station, it is possible to capture TV programs. Simply set up the capture parameters to the relevant source (Tuner, Composite or S-Video), and the compression format, then you are ready to begin capturing. Alternatively, if you prefer to use a corporate quality product such as Adobe Premiere, you can do that as well. The card worked flawlessly with Premiere, and this is my preferred way of using it.
- Other Installation Notes One interesting fact I noticed was that when the Pixelview Station software was upgraded from version 4.22 to 4.28, some problems occurred. The major issue of concern was that after clicking on the program in the start menu, instead of loading the TV or FM program in about 5 seconds, it took over 2 minutes. Therefore, I suggest using the 4.22 version, as there are no noticeable improvements in the later revision.
One other area that I also noticed is that the card is very sensitive to interference. When a Voodoo2 based card was placed in the adjacent PCI slot, the reception quality was noticeably worse than when the slot was vacant.
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