I've always fancied a TV card, and the fact that it is one of the easiest ways to access my camcorder (no, its not a digital camcorder) was the major point in getting it .
The PCLine turns out to be a ModularTech board manufactured as a Galaxy Television PCTV Tuner card. Info can be found at http://www.modulartech.com/galaxy/
Inside the box shown, you get a board , CD and a little booklet. The booklet explains how to install the card and how to install and use the software provided. Please note that the booklet warns that the software will NOT work under XP, Windows 2000 or Linux. No problems there for me, since my machine is currently running Millennium Edition. M.E. is mentioned in the booklet very sparingly, but as you will see, it hasnt caused me any problems.
| OK! The Board |
The board is a standard pci card. It took a few minutes to install it, most of this time being unplugging everything to get the case cover off. The only problem that I discovered was that the underside of the card has the heat shield metal fastening on it and this leads to the board not being entirely flat . Since I found this fouled the modem card on fitting, I simply moved down a slot to actually get it into the slot properly. If you only have one spare slot, you might need to trim the metal protrusions slightly if the adjacent card has any high spots on it.
After fitting the board. It remained to power back up and install the software. The little booklet details all the steps, but you could figure it out without it. It simply consists of inserting the CD and telling Windows (which has detected the card), to install the drivers from the CD.
Once the drivers have been installed, the system will ask for a reboot and after this, the Cd will come up with the Welcome screen for Galaxy Television and install the software for viewing the channels.
As a small side note, the booklet details the minimum spec required for the card to work. This is a lowly 200mhz and 32mb of ram , coupled with 2.5mb of hard drive space for the software. A graphics card and soundcard supported by at least DirectX 5 is also required. Offhand, I cant imagine many folk struggling to meet those requirements.
So, how well does it work. The software enables you to take stills from the card, or movies. BMP format and avi respectively. The avi is uncompressed, so takes up a lot of room!
Viewing is done by two programs, the Galaxy Television program and Teletext Explorer. There is software installed with the card for a remote control, but none come with the card.
Teletext is very impressive with all pages loading at the same time e.g. if you load a page with 20 sub pages, they are all there, it is simply a matter of scrolling down the page to get to them. This saves an enormous amount of time compared with conventional Teletext. The explorer interface also gives you the option of updating your P.C. clock and in the options of electing to do it when you start the software.
As well as having the fast text buttons on the top, you can also click on the page number to go there . clicking on a phone number on the page will also autodial it for you. You can add favourites for your pages like in the real explorer as well, and there are quite a few options for displaying as well, including changing the font.
Text can be copied and pasted from a Teletext page like this
All taken from the Sky digital signal heading for my television. I took the aerial signal required for the card from the RF output from the Sky decoder, as this gives all the channels I usually watch and leaves a jack free for the camcorder to plug in.
As you can see, the picture is adequate for viewing. The picture can be resized and can also give different aspects . These are normal, wide and DVD widescreen. The picture is actually pretty good on the monitor even at full screen, although usually I leave it as a small box in the corner
I think the card is pretty good value for money, but with the likes of the Radeon graphics card to mention just one, it may only be worthwhile if you dont intend updating your graphics card. The only real disadvantage is that it doesnt provide a TV out as well so that you could output from your computer .But, if like me, you wish to get video into your computer, this is one of the cheapest and easiest options. And, it has a few other benefits.
