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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
68 Comments
View All Comments
Johnmcl7 - Sunday, May 21, 2006 - link
That is correct, out of the box MCE cannot be joined to a domain although it can be modified to do so but at the cost of losing media extenders. Microsoft clearly wanted to keep businesses using Pro and MCE for home users.John
XMan - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
"The PVR-500 requires two separate CATV inputs, however, rather than splitting the signal internally."Ehh . . . no, the PVR-500 splits internally. The second input jack is for FM radio, just like the NVTV.
And the latest Hauppauge drivers have fixed a lot of the issues folks are having. I'm using two PVR-500's on MCE 2K5with the 23348 drivers and they work marvelously.
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
Crud. That was my error. I'll fix it - thanks.justauser - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
I guess that people who come to Anadtech have a strong technical background.Is anybody still watching analog TV out of this group? I haven't seen an anaolog program for over two years - in fact I find it impossible to watch & listen to analog. Surely every tech person has their HDTV & surround sound set up, don't they?
What's this nonsense about limited channels on OTA HD? We get about 40 in LA, of which about 15 have content I'm interested in. I don't bother with cable.
More nonsense about trouble receiving OTA HD. If you can get an analog signal you can surely get an HD digital one - do you realize how much more power is used to broadcast HD? It can be over 1 MW! When setting up an HD set you can test the HD picture with a set top antenna. You get an HD signal even when you can't see any analog channels.
So, dump reviews of analog tuners. People who buy them have limited tech knowledge and will probably never get them working anyway (like my neighbor who watches stretched analog on his HDTV and has got used to actors with fat heads, but nevermind HDTV is great!).
Trisped - Sunday, May 21, 2006 - link
Most people don't live in a big metorpolitan area, so they will be lucky to have 1 or 2 HD channels broadcast in the area.HDTV cable is rather expensive compared to the analog or even digital, and the fact that most channels are a sick mix of high and low def makes the veiwing experince undesireable (at least that is what my local friends say).
I don't own a DTV or HDTV tuner. Instead I own a high quality PC. I have been thinking of upgrading to an HDTV tuner, but the only one I have heard of is the ATI HDTV tuner which is PCI and has was reported to have some compatability problems. Since this is a first gen card that is to be expect, but I don't want to pay $100+ to be part of the beta testing. I will wait till there is a PCIe version that seems to work well with what I use, then I will upgrade.
nullpointerus - Sunday, May 21, 2006 - link
Anandtech reviewed some other brands of HDTV tuners in their last roundup:http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2634&p...">http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2634&p...
Unfortunately, there's nothing in that review that meets all your requirements.
Schugy - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
Of course I use DVB-T with MythTV, xine or dvbtune+mplayer. DVB-S is no option because some people want to make money with encrypting free tv. That guys must be kidding.austonia - Saturday, May 20, 2006 - link
checked nvidia's store and was dissapointed to find out that the package that comes with an MCE remote costs $50 more! $219... ugh.http://store.nvidia.com/product.aspx?sku=2866288&a...">http://store.nvidia.com/product.aspx?sku=2866288&a...
gman81 - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
this website's inability to take your comment or this nvidia tuner review. Both are lame. (the comment window wipes your text if you're not careful or when you click Post Comment, it has a "server error"). What junk.nullpointerus - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
I think when you wait to long to hit the "post comment" button, there is a server error. No idea why.