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Compro VideoMate Live USB2.0 External TV Tuner

Join the community - in the OCAU Forums! Date  26th June 2004 Author  Chainbolt Editor  James "Agg" Rolfe Manufacturer  Compro Technology Settings, Screenshots, The Verdict ComproPVR has a scalable buffer size for the time shifting function of up to 3 hours. Naturally capturing and recording at the same time needs more processing power than TV capturing only and the frame rate goes down a little.   Left: Audio/Video Settings - Right: MPEG Encoder Settings We mentioned already that the fan on the Cirrus encoding chip is controlled by a temperature sensor. Under regular thermal conditions the fan is not powered. It was heard to spin up only a few times during many weeks of testing, obviously when the chipset’s temperature exceeded a given threshold. The fan running at 7,500 rpm is rather noisy. That came as surprise. We expected less noise knowing that this fan is based on supposedly noise reducing technology. PICTURE QUALITY The picture quality when watching TV live depends almost entirely on the signal quality. For our tests we selected therefore Cabler TV as the source in order to get an undisturbed impression about the quality of the TV tuner and the decoder chip. Using antenna signals might result in quality degrading coming from weak signals and not from problems with the tuner or the decoding chip. Using the default PVR windows monitor size of approximately 10 cm x 15 cm the TV picture quality was crystal clear. When changing to “full screen” mode on a 22-inch monitor we could see very small distortions. Such small distortions seem to be unavoidable. We observed the same with the Asus TV 880 and Compro’s VideoMateTV Gold. Watching TV “full screen” with such a huge monitor is like using a magnifying glass which makes even the smallest “impurities” visible. Yet, the full screen TV watching quality with a PC monitor is still better than with a regular TV set, because of the higher resolution a PC monitor is normally running. ComproPVR is not only providing the user interface for TV watching but doubles as a digital video recorder. It converts analog video stream, such as from home video tapes, to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 digital formats for editing and recording to a CD or DVD-ROM. It can record motion video and audio form any video source such as the internal TV tuner, video cameras, or a VHS recorder. PVR offers noise reduction, smoothing, and hardware scaling to improve visual quality. The captured video stream is saved on the harddisk and can be watched by using the PVR TV window. Capturing and recording with the VideoMate is also possible with others than Compro’s own software. These are namely the Windows XP integrated “Moviemaker” and the bundled Ulead applications. These programs offer additional encoding formats like AVI or WMV, let you edit the recorded video and burn it onto CD or DVD. Ulead DVD factory even offers directly burning the captured stream onto a CD or DVD. That avoids the normally necessary time consuming saving on a harddisk prior to CD/DVD burning. Last but not least: PVR has a snapshot function to capture still images from running TV broadcast or otherwise captured video stream.       We have tested all these functions for several weeks. In total more than 100 GB of video stream were recorded and edited from the TV tuner, from video recorder by video composite cable, and from a digital camera by S-video cable using Compro’s PVR, the bundled Ulead applications and Windows XP Moviemaker. We found that video capturing, recoding and replay is working issue free with the bundled software. A word of warning though regarding the storage requirements when using the VideoMate Live USB 2.0 TV for capturing and recording: Some serious capacity is required to store the recorded and maybe later edited video stream. When using the default MPEG II bit rate of 4 MB/sec a 1 minute video clip takes around 30 MB of hard disk space. Recording a 90 minute broadcast requires 2.7 GB of harddisk space. The video bit rate can be increased to 15 MB/sec for better quality and accordingly even more hard disk space is required. PC users familiar with video editing are of course used to such kind of capacity requirements. We regard a free capacity of around 40 GB as minimum requirement for using the capturing and editing functions provided by the VideoMate Live USB 2.0. THE VERDICT Our overall experience with the VideoMate Live USB 2.0 TV was good. It’s a carefully engineered, well functioning TV Tuner and video capture device. As an external USB device its very easy to install and can effortless be changed between different PCs or even used with notebooks. All necessary software for TV or video stream watching, capturing, editing, and recording is included. The provided picture quality is good. Last but not least: The VideoMate Live USB 2.0 TV box is well designed. What we missed are FM reception and a power-up function for scheduled TV recording in absence of the user. The VideoMate Live USB 2.0 is retailing for around 300 AUS $ in Australia and 200 US $ in the US. That’s pretty expensive in comparison to internal TV Tuners cards like the VideoMateTV Gold Plus with FM reception from the same company which goes for around 130 AUS $ in Australia. But for those who are looking for an external TV tuner and capture solution, Compro’s VideoMate Live USB 2.0 is certainly a good buy. << Back OCAU Main Page Select Page Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 -

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