Compro VideoMate H900 PCI TV/FM Card

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 9.5%       Manufacturer: Compro

In The Box

When you break through the plastic wrap and get to the goodies hidden inside, you’ll be greeted with several items. Besides the TV board itself, you get a remote control (with batteries no less), all necessary cabling to handle the features of the product, a driver disk, two additional program disks, an antenna for the radio functions, a user manual and a short PCI bracket for those needing to install inside a small enclosure.

Before we dig too deeply into the board itself, we’ll take a quick look at the peripheral accessories to give us an idea of what we can expect.

As I mentioned earlier, you have all the cables you need to handle the task at hand. Going in order of the pictured items above we have an infrared receiver (for the remote control), power crossover cable (to allow for remote PC startup), the FM radio antenna, an S-Video breakout cable set, standard RCA crossover cabling in case you need to have separate sound going into your audio board, and a cable connection converter.

The software package that comes with the H900 device consists not only of the drivers for the card, but other handy utilities and programs as well.

The driver pack loads not only the drivers but also the utilities necessary to make use of this multimedia device. We’ll dig a little deeper into these in a bit, though.

The other 2 disks contain programs that you may or may not have a desire for. VideoStudio and MovieFactory are included to help you make the most of any data you save to disk. These programs will help you crop and edit video data for a more professional look. Since these are stand alone products as well as a part of the included software bundle, we won’t be going into depth on these programs.

Since it would be entirely too much to ask for us to actually move a mouse and change a channel, Compro has included a remote control that allows you to utilize all of this board’s functions. What is even more surprising is the addition of batteries.