Tuning Into Digital TV

A computer can do many things: connect you to the internet, burn DVDs, play music and store all your digital photos. With the addition of a simple tuner card and some software it can also become a television and personal video recorder, capable of recording your favourite programmes to the computer hard drive.

The Hauppauge WinTV analogue and digital tuner does exactly that. It's the first tuner card I've tried that is built into a UBS (universal serial bus).

I've owned TV tuner cards that either fit into the spare card slot within my desktop computer and the more accessible PC card slot on my laptop. The USB format is about as convenient as the PC card method.

Once the drivers and software are installed, all you need do is plug in the USB tuner, connect it to the supplied 35cm high-gain aerial and let the software automatically tune in the available free-to-air TV stations.

But it's not quite that simple with the WinTV tuner. The device only supports the fast USB 2.0 interface, not the earlier USB 1.1 standard that older computers use. For recording TV to the hard drive you will need a fast machine - a Pentium 4 with a 3GHz processor is recommended.

While the USB stick is quite compact, it's fatter than most USB storage sticks and obscured the neighbouring USB port on my laptop. An extension cable is supplied, allowing you to clear access to your USB ports, but it's not a very tidy or pretty solution.

The tuner sticks' selling point is that it is capable of receiving digital TV signals and is designed for the British terrestrial Freeview (DVB-T) service, which allows viewers to watch dozens of free-to-air channels with improved image and sound quality.

New Zealand will launch its own Freeview service next year and viewers will need a digital set-top box to receive the signals. The Freeview signals are beamed out unencrypted so it's highly likely that the WinTV tuner will pick up Freeview when it becomes available here.

The local Freeview consortium is yet to announce which set-top boxes and tuner devices will support the service so be cautious buying digital TV devices in the interim.

The WinTV 2000 software is a bit underwhelming compared with other TV tuner suites, but lets you scan for channels, schedule recordings and take live snapshots. Hitting "record" will start recording the TV feed to your hard drive in the mpeg2 video format. This will consume about 1.5GB of data per hour of video. There doesn't appear to be any provision for the electronic programming guide that may be offered when Freeview arrives.

For analogue recordings, the tuner card worked well, but the supplied aerial was unable to deliver a clear picture. Plugging into a roof-mounted aerial gives better results but defeats the portable purpose. There's no remote so you'll have to revert to keyboard or mouse to change channel.

The WinTV tuner will appeal to travellers who want to use their laptop as a TV or those inclined to using their computer as a cheap video recorder. But it looks in need of updating and by the time digital TV arrives, there's likely to be a new version.

Some new technology will coem some otherday and then we will start finding its advantage over this, so lets see for how long it stays before a new challenge arrives. I assure you that I will the first one to give you information...