Test of almost half a dozen tuner cards - in the spirit of DVB-T

Since these are basically portable devices, we took out and dusted off our good "old" MSI GX600 notebook and offered it with a brand new 32-bit Hungarian Windows Vista SP2. First the II. district, we tried digital tax search, but to our surprise, none of our players produced anything here (even after several hours of struggle). However, we gained experience: the software of NOT (ArcSoft) and Items (TV Expert) was installed without any problems, while AVerTV 6 was only able to be loaded properly on our laptop after several restarts.

This was followed by a rehearsal in Kelenföld. It is now AVerMedia we have launched with their products since they already are proved by us - that's why we don't even write about software outs and features right now, we're more into buying options. In a few minutes, AVerTV found all the Hungarian DVB-T broadcasts - eight in number, but it was only able to display the six free-to-air broadcasts.

The software is most similar to Cyberlink's PowerDVD, it requires a little getting used to (of course it's highly subjective). When changing channels, the sound responds immediately, you have to wait a few seconds (max.) For the picture. AVerTV 6 is perfect for this purpose.

However, this is where our purely positive experiences ended, as we achieved almost nothing with the other competitors. We had no choice but to call the importer to see what they had come up with in the service department beforehand with the ones that came to us. Well, we guessed right: nothing in terms of digital broadcasts. According to them, Items' products suffer from a lack of software support - but we didn't get anywhere with other programs either. NOT worked "a little" for them, however, according to their experience, the added ArcSoft package requires at least 4 GB of RAM (!).

We will say a few more words about that items units. We are sorry that they have not been able to get involved with DVB-T, as they have an encouraging look - it is enough to look at the antenna, which reached the 2nd place in the field (it's the same as ASUS For US2-400). The fact is, however, that the Expert TV packaged with them stuck out of line - unfortunately in a negative direction. The software has a fairly rudimentary user interface and has not stolen into our hearts during use. Of course, the ITVs coped with analog broadcasts - but unfortunately that wasn’t the purpose of our article right now.

Unfortunately, Items TV Expert did not find any digital channels

Let's move on to NOTto! With the slogan "we believe it when we see it", we started the tax search. The added TotalMedia 3.5 software greets us like an old friend, as we get the same for the aforementioned ASUS tuner. For this reason, we will not analyze ArcSoft's product in detail right now, colleague Gábor Pintér did this in the already mentioned May in Article.

ASUS also chose ArcSoft

With its own antenna, the L5VH could only find m1 and m2 transmitters (along with the radios) - with relatively poor reception quality (which is a rip off in the digital world). The situation was different with the small "bar" of Items, these two transmitters played music almost perfectly. We also tried it with AVerMedia's antenna, which is by far the most serious unit in the field. We searched for the channels again, and lo and behold: NOT found all the channels: m1 HD, m2 HD, Duna TV HD, Duna TV II Autonomy, RTL Klub and TV2. However, so that we can enjoy the programs of the latter two, I had to ask my friend to stand by the window for a few hours holding the antenna. From all this, the only thing that follows is that the Hybrid USB has a rather low sensitivity.

This is how TotalMedia recognizes NOT LV5H

TotalMedia is actually a multimedia entertainment center - like MCE, with only much more modest capabilities - not very complicated to manage. Its speed won’t beat the skies, however, it will rather only annoy more impatient users. (We would like to add an important note here: we also tried the AVerTV Volar HX with this software. TotalMedia indicated maximum reception quality for all transmitters, and at the same time the channel changes became very agile.) We are not saying that it would not give rise to minor improvements - even in terms of manageability - but it is perfectly suited to what has been devised. We would like to highlight a small - but perhaps all the more inconvenient - negative: automatic aspect ratio recognition unfortunately did not work in our case, so we have to switch separately for each transmitter (4: 3 or 16: 9) if necessary.

AVer: after a few minutes of thinking, the software was working properly, switching between channels could be better