TV Card

January 5th, 2006

Just got my TV Card and I’ve been playing around with it a bit. You can get a decent digital Freeview TV Card now for £40 which gives you access to some 40 TV channels. With most TV cards, you can record television, timeshift it (pause live television) and whatever.

I was originally going to get the Nova-T card but the customer ratings for the Freecom USB stick sold it to me. The fact that it’s easily usable in any computer and quick to install (e.g. can be used on laptop) was great although the fact that I can’t pick up anything using the room aerial was a bit of a bummer as it limits the usefulness of being able to use it on the move.

It works really well but there are some major shortcomings in the included software. It all works but there is no decent EPG support (it won’t tell you whats on) and it doesn’t respect Freeview’s television channel numbers. Additionally, it’ll only find channels which are currently broadcasting so you won’t be able to have both BBC Three/BBC Four and CBBC/CBeebies as they timeshare. The included software does works but I’m not a huge fan so I’ll be uninstalling it and experimenting with some alternative drivers and programs.  

I don’t have perfect reception; this renders the recordings generally unusable with Windows Media Player and other programs as these programs will throw up for example when they detect an incorrect GOP size. Hopefully a signal booster and some tools such as ProjectX and VideoReDo will be able to fix these problems. 

Overall I think it’s well worth getting a TV card since you can get one at £40. You essentially get all the features of a PVR which costs around £250. However, make sure you have access to a rooftop aerial as indoor aerials are useless for  It’s also great being able to record digital; even though all the televisions in our house are Freeview-enabled, none of the video recorders can record from digital. So I can finally record Quantum Leap and Andromeda :)

P.S. What was the point of having a fake celebrity in the celebrity Big Brother house? I didn’t count any real celebrities in the house in the first place. 

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One Response to “TV Card”

  1. # Sexysoraon 06 Jan 2006 at 3:58 pm

    Agreed, a few months ago I would have thought they were a useless gimmick, but they really are uuseful and cool.
    Timeshifting in Gandhi was useful to no end.

    Also, I said don’t use the included software - use something like Windows MCE or some Linux/OSS variant.

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