If you’re a video enthusiast, then you no doubt have (or want) a Home Theater PC. Not only can it replace an entire rack full of equipment, but it can do things that consumer equipment just cannot easily do… like record HDTV onto BluRay or HD-DVD disks. To even begin to step into this world, you need to record the raw HDTV signals, and there is no consumer equipment that lets you do that. You either have to hack a set-top-box (STB) to stream the signal over firewire, or record over-the-air (OTA) HDTV with a capture card.
ADS Technology has introduced a video capture solution to grab those new-fangled digital airwaves and put them on your desktop… the ADS InstantHDTV PCI video capture card. It is a single PCI solution that allows you to not only capture HDTV, but has a full-blown hardware MPEG-encoder for standard defiinition TV and supports time-shifting, too.
HDTV is here now!
Today 95% of all households in the U.S. can receive HDTV from at least one network broadcaster. And more than 85% can receive an HDTV signal from three or more network broadcasters.
Enjoy all the clarity and brilliance of crystal clear HDTV broadcasts on your PC monitor instead of buying a new HDTV. HDTV broadcast’s look better because they have up to 6 times the resolution of standard TV broadcasts and many broadcasts include Dolby 5.1 Audio so HDTV sounds better too! And HDTV is FREE – HD Shows are broadcast over the air, no need for cable TV or satellite subscriptions. Just add Instant HDTV PCI and a TV antenna to receive HDTV! If you still have analog Cable TV in your house you can also use the Instant HDTV PCI to receive standard TV and Cable broadcasts in addition to HDTV broadcasts.
Full Featured Personal Video Recorder Capabilities
Instant HDTV PCI includes SnapStream’s Beyond TV which transforms your PC into a home theatre powerhouse with a powerful integrated electronic program guide. Beyond TV lets you see “What’s On” and watch it now or schedule for future recording. Beyond TV incorporates powerful Digital TV capabilities that allow you to Pause, Fast Forward and Rewind Live TV as well as recorded programs. You have the power to program recordings of future airings by searching the electronic program guide by title or keyword.
Features:
- Receive FREE over the Air HDTV broadcasts on your PC
- Microsoft Media Center Edition Certified
- Supports normal TV broadcasts and cable TV signals
- Control TV with IR Remote Control
- Record HDTV, Analog and Cable TV to your computer hard drive.
- Schedule TV Recordings in Beyond TV Express
- Search the Electronic Program Guide for your favorite shows by title or keyword
- Time-Shift TV Watching
- Pause, Rewind and Fast Forward live TV
- Display information for a summary of the program you are watching
- Archive TV shows to CD or DVD for playback on your home DVD Player
The ADS InstantHDTV package comes in an ordinary cardboard box that looks like a typical software box. Inside is the HDTV PCI card iteself, a driver CD, manuals, remote control and IR sensor. There was no HDTV antenna included, so you cannot record HD right out of the box and you’ll have to buy an additional HD antenna.
The card itself has the same HDTV tuner that other cards use: analog cable and HDTV antenna coax inputs included on one box. The MPEG decoder chip is of the latest generation, as it doesn’t get very hot and needs no heatsink. Looking at the back of the card we only see three inputs: the HDTV antenna input, the analog cable input, and an 1/8th inch jack for the included IR sensor. I was disappointed that there was no S-Video or audio inputs, as this would make this card an all-purpose capture solution.
The included remote control has lots of buttons and features to control several of your PC’s multimedia functions. It features standard volume control, channel buttons, 4-way navigation butons, and standard play/pause buttons. It also includes buttons for several multimedia functions, including DVD, photo, video, music and such. It even features A/B looping; a feature I wish more standard remotes would include. The remote works exclusively with the included IR sensor that plugs into the back of the PCI card.
Installation
Installation was very quick and smooth. The card plugs directly into any free PCI slot. Once inserted and secured in place, Windows immediately sees it and prompts for a driver. Since I am using Windows Vista Ultimate, I had to download drivers, as the included CD only supports Windows XP. Vista then told me that the card was installed successfully and was working properly.
After this I went into Windows Media Center to configure the TV card, but Media Center could not recognize it. On the included driver CD was an MPEG driver for Windows Media Center, but was intended for Windows XP. After installing this driver, Vista’s Windows Media Center saw the card, and I was able to configure the TV signal and setup channels. MCE recognized the card as a HD tuner and scanned all the bands for signal strength. It all went very smoothly after the extra MCE driver was installed.
HD video quality was very good, although I was only able to receive a few channels (a problem that most OTA HDTV enthusiasts will probably encounter). Since the signal is completely digital, you either receive the signal, or don’t… you either get a perfect signal, or a black screen. A weak signal will manifest itself as the signal popping on and off, which can be made better with a larger HD antenna or better placement.
The files are then recorded to your PC’s hard drive, and HD programs can be quite large (a one-hour program can take up 15 Gigabtes). There is no option of modifying the compression quality, as the HDTV card just streams the raw signal rather than re-encoging through the onboard MPEG chip. You can change the video quality of standard-definition video, resulting in larger or smaller files depending on your preference.
Although HDTV is a standard MPEG2 stream, Media Center likes to package the MPEG packets in an ASF envelope, which encodes meta-information about the file, as well as offers “some” sort of copy protection. This is why all your recorded TV files have a .DVR-MS extention instead of a standard .MPG extention (that every other “open” DVR software records). Through the magic of software, we can strip out that unsightly ASF garbage and produce a standard MPEG file, suitable for editing in any standard video editor. I use AutoDVRConvert to do this conversion, which is fairly quick, since it’s not recompressing the file, but rather just stripping out unwanted information from the video file.
One thing that puzzled me is that the driver had an option to capture from S-video. If the card supports S-video and the driver supports S-video… then why wasn’t an S-video port included on the card? That would totally make this card a complete video-capture solution. Unfortunately, the only analog signal that can be captured is through the analog cable’s coax input.
I have DirecTV, so I had to test the analog cable signal at a friend’s house. Standard-definition capture was very good, looking only slightly less crisp than the original signal (which is a problem of MPEG encoding, not necessarially a reflection of the encoder chip). We all know that watching standard cable is like watching TV through a muddy fish-tank, so all I can say is that the signal looked about as good as the original… but it’s still analog cable. For most people, this card will only be used to capture Over-the-air HDTV.
I have tried several HDTV cards for my home theater PCs, and this one works just as well as the others. It offers no features above and beyond other HDTV cards, but doesn’t offer any less, either. The video quality is very good, especially the HDTV quality, but I wish it included S-video and audio input jacks. If it could record from an external set-top box, then this would be the only card you would ever really need; as it costs about the same as a good-quality standard-definition capture board. It would be like geting HDTV capture for free!
Alas, the InstantHDTV only allows you to capture over-the-air HDTV, and your mileage may vary depending on where you live. This is one of those “iffy” situations where it’s difficult to recommend this product. The answer is: it depends. If you are looking to add OTA HDTV to your HTPC, then this card is recommended based on its quality vs. price. If you have analog cable, then you’ll get more value out of this card, but if a video nut is enthusiastic enough to get a HTPC, then they’re probably not going to have just basic cable. Unless you live in the center of all the broadcast towers (usually downtown), then you’ll probably need to spend several hundred dollars to get ALL the HDTV signals in your area.
One big advantage a HTPC offers over even a high-definition TiVo is the ability to extract and edit the recorded content. If you want to capture HDTV shows and record them onto blu-ray or HD-DVD, then you probably already have an STB with firewire hack to record HD-HBO). For the rest of you who want to record HDTV content on your PC, the ADS InstantHDTV PCI card is a good choice.
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