AverTV Volar Black HD

Sit back, put your feet up and relax while PCW takes a look at anything and everything to do with TV on your PC.

By Scott Bartley / Tuesday, December 01 2009

USB TV tuner
A few months back we looked briefly at a handful of USB TV tuners that let users watch broadcast TV on their PC. This time round we’re going to take a closer look at just one of these devices, the AverTV Volar Black HD, and tell you a little more about what it does and how well it does it.
First off, if you’re new to TV on your PC, plugging in a USB stick tuner such as the AverTV Volar can turn your humble PC into a television in a matter of minutes. Simply plug the stick into a vacant USB port, plug the other end into your UHF TV aerial, install the software that comes with the tuner and you’re all set to watch (and record) TV on your PC.

A word of warning, this tuner will only receive the Freeview HD digital terrestrial signal. This is the service broadcast from land-based transmission towers, not the satellite service, so the coverage area isn’t as broad as satellite service and you’ll need to make sure you’re in a Freeview HD covered area before you buy the tuner. The Freeview website (freeviewnz.tv) has coverage maps showing where you can receive Freeview HD.

In the AverTV box we find the USB stick itself, a tiny UHF antenna and a short (around 10cm long) USB extension cable, which is more of a safety feature than anything else since it’ll stop you accidentally snapping the thing off if you’re using it with a notebook. There’s also a CD containing the TV viewing software and a very basic manual that steps you through the installation process.

The manual recommends users plug in the USB stick, cancel the automated Windows driver installation wizard that pops up, then install the drivers and application from the CD.

The above process took about a minute on our test system (A Toshiba Satellite U500 notebook with 4GB of RAM and powerful 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo CPU). Next we had to actually tune the channels, which was as simple as pushing the Scan button in the application window that opens immediately after installation. Since the PCW office is right in the middle of transmissions from the Sky Tower and the mast on top of the Waitakere Ranges, most of the channels were duplicated in the listing. Fixing this was, thankfully, a simple matter of unchecking a few boxes in the Settings window.

Once this was done were able to watch crystal clear Freeview HD broadcast on our notebook. The signal strength in central Auckland was strong enough that we only needed the little antenna that came with the AverTV but most users will need to plug in a roof-mounted UHF aerial for best results.

The software interface is pretty decent and on our system channel switching was fairly swift (sometimes PC-based TVs tend to be horribly slow to change channels), too. Recording and time-shifting worked flawlessly and the application will even record in an iPod- or Sony PSP-friendly H.264 MPEG4 video format.

The only downsides we managed to find with the AverTV were the high system requirements needed to decode the high definition Freeview HD broadcasts (while silky smooth on our dual core system, our old 1.8GHz Pentium-M notebook stuttered frequently with the HD channels), and the lack of an 8-day EPG. Only the names of shows screening now and next were displayed because Freeview in New Zealand uses a system called MHEG5 to deliver the full electronic programme guide and the AverTV wasn’t able to receive it.