The Card
The DualTV MCE fits into a PCI slot and operates alongside your video card much like ATI's Theater 550 Pro. The card is passively cooled and has no external power connections, making installation very easy. It comes with a CATV/TV antenna input, two S-VIDEO and audio inputs, and an FM antenna.
The card comes bundled with all the necessary connectors for a wide variety of home theater and audio setups, as well as a standard remote control for use with Windows Media Center. The card takes a standard single cable input and splits it into two signals internally, and the on board amplifier and splitter ensures better signal quality than having an external splitter do the job. The DualTV MCE's MPEG encoder is made by a company called Vixs, and the two tuners on it are made by Philips. Below is an illustration of the card's basic architecture.
Features
As far as features go, the DualTV MCE is fairly straightforward. It's biggest feature would be the fact that, as its name indicates, it offers dual video in, allowing you to watch and record two programs at the same time. This is essentially what cable services like TiVo and DVR offer, however because it is recording to your computer, the capacity for how much can be recorded and stored is potentially much higher.There are other smaller features of the DualTV MCE, when used with Windows Media Center Edition, that add to the overall package, such as something called MediaSqueeze. MediaSqueeze basically lets you record live TV at a lower bit rate without a major loss in quality. It also lets you translate video that's already been recorded to a lower bit rate, with 4 different quality settings: fair, good, better, and best mode. This allows you to make better use of your disk space for video archiving. NVIDIA's PureVideo is incorporated into the package, which ensures good quality digital video decoding. PureVideo can be purchased for use with any NVIDIA GPU, but the fact that it is bundled with the DualTV is a good thing. We would like to see PureVideo come bundled with graphics cards in the future as well.
Windows XP MCE
Windows XP Media Center Edition is a version of Windows that offers a variety of audio and video applications beyond what you get with the standard Windows XP OS. An interesting side note is that MCE 2005 includes many of the performance enhancements of Windows Server 2003, so it can actually outperform XP Pro systems by a small margin. The main interface for multimedia applications is easy to navigate and full of options.
Windows MCE is listed as a minimum requirement for the DualTV MCE, and is not included with the card package. Unfortunately, there is no software provided for non-MCE Windows installations. This seems a little strange to us, but our focus for this review is on the card itself, and we will be looking more in depth at Windows MCE in a future article.
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nullpointerus - Sunday, May 21, 2006 - link
I think we're digressing. There are cards made and marketed to run cheapo bundled PVR apps, and there are people who buy and use those cheapo apps. And that's the audience I think this article was written for - in contrast to the more in-depth review Anandtech readers expected. That's as simple as I can make it.SaidiaDude - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
No ATSC support (HDTV over the air)? Mpeg4?LoneWolf15 - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
Yes...IF you purchase MCE. That locks me into a solution I don't want. What if I want to use SageTV, BeyondTV, Meedio, or (my personal favorite as its closed-source-but-free) GB-PVR? I could do this with one Hauppauge WinTV PVR-500, or I could buy two WinTV PVR-150's. It appears I can't do it with one of these cards, meaning I'm possibly stuck facing Microsoft DRM, a limited choice.
EDIT: I finally noticed at the end of your article that this can be used with other solutions. This is very unclear; do I still need Windows MCE even with SageTV/BeyondTV? Or can I get the drivers to work with XP Pro? You're running a site dedicated to enthusiasts, not novices; we want to know these things up front, not on the last page.
Your screenshots for each tuner were of different images, making it hard to make a true analysis of quality. I know it makes the article look pretty, but it hurts the comparison. And while you posted the power draw of these cards, you said nothing of CPU usage. I know all the cards have hardware encoders, but it's certainly possible that one might do a better job than the other. When I had a HTPC, I built it on a low-temperature low-budget CPU (Celeron 1.3GHz) and relied on the card to do the work for me (Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150), and it worked. I'm sure many would like to do the same (though maybe slightly higher-end than mine).
Side note: You may not know this by the way, but many people with TiVo have found hacks that let them do the things you say are not possible with a TiVo. I don't have one myself, but I can use my ReplayTV to transfer shows to a PC and archive them, and/or convert them to DVD with software. There are plenty of sites showing how to do this for serious DVR users, like the ones who read Anandtech. After all, you're talking about a part that someone can build a HTPC with; entry-level users will buy a pre-made Media Center PC, or a DVR, and leave it at that.
jelifah - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
From the article:That's an outright lie. If you install TiVO Desktop on your computer you can pull shows from your TiVO to your computer AND you can place mpeg videos from your computer on to your TiVO.
Once you have the .tivo file on your computer you can watch them for free, or purchase Sonic DVD and burn them to DVD. Or just get a simple 'hack' that converts them to mpeg.
I'm not trying to be harsh, but to say it's "just not possible" is utter fallacy. And to even act like it's complicated would still be stretching the truth.
nullpointerus - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
Um...society seems to have forgotten this at the moment, but for something to be a lie, it has to be a falsehood AND known as such by the teller. That's offensive, so I would suggest that you just resign yourself to saying, "That's not true," instead of saying, "That's an outright lie."http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=lie">http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=lie
As much as we like them, AT's writers are not omniscient. ;)
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
I've edited this to reflect the intended meaning. You can't edit/record/etc. your TiVo movies without a PC. The standard TiVo + subscription gets you a box that records movies, and that's it. It's nice enough, but given the cost and the added flexibility a PC gives - and you'll be using a PC anyway with TiVo if you want to do anythin extra, right? - if you're interested in editing recordings and saving them to DVDR, it's generally a lot easier to just skip TiVo and go straight to a TV Tuner card.JarredWalton - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
Getting screenshots of the same image is rather difficult, unless you want to record a show using some other device (i.e. VCR) and capture that. I agree that different shots could have been used, though. Anyway, BeyondTV and SageTV do work, even though the card isn't advertised for such use. That's one of the odd things about the "DualTV MCE" - why is it MCE? Still, MCE is actually a pretty decent OS.GoatMonkey - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
No. I use Beyond TV runs on XP Pro. I don't see any reason that using this card would make any difference. The MCE in the name of some of these cards is just a marketing thing.
To test I suppose you would really need a recorded video playing back from another computer outputting to coaxial, or have all of the devices installed in different computers side by side and grab screenshots of the same moments in the shows. Plugging a S-video cable into the back and playing a DVD into it might be easier.
I don't really know which method is best, but the article months ago about a different TV tuner card seemed to have some better comparison screenshots. I don't mean to put down the article's writer though, it was well written, but could have gone into some more details like that. I definitely appreciate coverage of the subject.
Trisped - Sunday, May 21, 2006 - link
I think he was asking about the drivers for the card. I know I just built a system for a friend. The mother board came with a Gb lan, but the drivers on the CD wouldn't work for MCE. Called tech support and they said that MCE wasn't supported for most of their boards. I wounder if the reverse is true for this tuner, do they supply drivers that will work in Pro or Home?nullpointerus - Sunday, May 21, 2006 - link
Well, if you download the drivers, this is what the installer says:http://www.uploadfile.info/uploads/395879b307.png">http://www.uploadfile.info/uploads/395879b307.png
I take it the "or compatible third party application" means that it'd work in plain XP SP2 with SageTV or BeyondTV for example.