Project Lounge

Bringing the PC to the world of AV.

By Scott Bartley / Tuesday, September 01 2009

Last month we discussed the pros and cons of trying to integrate a TV tuner into a home theatre PC. We also reached the conclusion that an as-yet-unreleased operating system (Windows 7) was the best choice. This month we take a closer look at some of the details involved with installing a TV tuner into a Windows 7-based machine.

Installing a TV tuner is easy. There are two choices, USB or PCI. If you're building a HTPC yourself and have spare PCI slots on your motherboard, an internal-style tuner will be the best choice. These tuners invariably offer more features (things like hardware accelerated video decoding to take the strain off the CPU, and dual tuners) and are also somewhat tidier than having a USB stick dangling out the back of your HTPC.

But let's not discount USB-based tuners just yet. Clearly, if you've picked a notebook as a home theatre PC, then USB is pretty much the only option. If this is the case you may want to try something like the AVerMedia AVerTV Volar Black HD tuner. It costs just over $100, is about the size of a pen and comes with everything you need to get up and running with Freeview HD. We tested it and the supplied software worked perfectly with Freeview, although Windows 7 wouldn't detect the device without first installing the Vista drivers off the supplied CD.

We also tried a couple of older DVB-T USB tuners we had lying around from the likes of Pinnacle and Hauppague. Both installed quickly and easily without the need for any extra drivers, but the bundled software doesn't work with Freeview HD's video encoding. In fact, until recently very few TV tuners came with TV viewing software that actually supported Freeview HD, so if you intend to use the supplied software as your main method for viewing TV, check the box first and ensure the supplied software supports MPEG4 video playback. Of course, since we're using Windows 7 Media Centre as our TV viewing software, pretty much any DVB-T tuner will do the trick.

Having established that almost any tuner with DVB-T printed on the box will suffice for Freeview HD, we arrive at our next consideration – processing power. While some PCI tuners will have specialised processing chips on board to take the strain off the PC's CPU, many will not. Likewise, no USB-based tuner will offer hardware video processing. This means you'll need to ensure your system has enough power to handle the jandal. How much power is enough? We tested USB TV tuners on two notebooks – one, a four year old ASUS with a single core 1.6GHz Pentium M and 1GB of RAM, and the other a stonking great MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz dual core CPU and 4GB of RAM. Both were running Windows 7 RC. For standard definition TV both these machines worked fine, with smooth video and fast operation. However, any HD content (which means all three main channels on Freeview HD) simply wouldn't work on the lowly single core Pentium M. Video stuttered and lagged like a YouTube video over dial up. When it comes to viewing Freeview HD a home theatre PC is going to require a dual core CPU and as much RAM as you can throw at it.

With processing power and tuner sorted, Windows 7 makes things easy for the rest of the process. Fire up Media Centre, and if it doesn't automatically prompt you to set up your new TV tuner, simply go to the TV settings page to get your channels tuned in.

Freeview HD channels will be named and sorted (that's the nature of digital TV) and you can, of course, shuffle things around to your own liking.

The only downside is that Windows 7 Media Centre doesn't support the MHEG5 method Freeview HD uses to transmit the 8-day programming guide so all the data we get out of the box are the Now and Next listings.

Next month, we'll take a look at the mythical ‘electronic programming guide’.