3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV

by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 3, 1999 2:29 AM EST

TV-Tuner

The Phillips FM/TV Tuner built on to the 3500 is essentially the silver box you see sitting on the card. The two coaxial inputs on the connector plate are, from top to bottom, for the FM and TV inputs respectively. The same VisualReality application is used for the TV tuner input, and when using the coaxial input the remote control becomes useful as it now controls channel tuning. The same capture options apply to the TV-Tuner as it uses the same VisualReality application we just talked about.

The TV window is fully scalable up to a full screen resolution, as discussed before, and a few unique features such as channel blocking (for parents) as well as closed captioning are included in the VisualReality application. The ability to zoom in the TV window is also a neat feature, and to top of the feature list is the ability to preview many channels at once and choose different "skins" for your remote control, sort of like the ever-so-popular skins for Winamp, the MP3 player.

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Brightness, contrast, color and tint controls are provided in the Video Settings tab of the 3dfx TV properties panel. The 3dfx TV properties panel is where you can set what channels you want blocked as well as change their blocked passwords. Using the Video Capture and Timed Record tabs, your PC can turn into a VCR. You can select what resolution you want to capture still images in (up to 640 x 480) and what resolution you want to capture video streams in. Unfortunately you are limited to 320 x 240 or 160 x 120 when you're capturing video streams in either AVI or MPEG2 format.

The FM Tuner uses a separate application, 3dfx FM, that lets you capture, you guessed it, audio. The FM application also lets you preset up to 9 radio stations (if it could only weed out the annoying radio announcers) as well as provide you with all the standard FM tuner functions.

Web TV


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With the release of Windows 98, Microsoft has included their WebTV for Windows software that allows for a whole new way to watch TV using your PC. WebTV for Windows is nothing like the set top boxes that allow you to browse the internet on your TV without a computer. WebTV for Windows should allow a whole new level of interactive TV - once it is completely supported that is.

A program guide is downloaded and shows you everything that is on in plain text. A small preview of the channel is shown at right. You can then select what you want to watch with the click of the mouse.

The 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 is compatible with WebTV, and it can be a useful feature as watching TV on your PC in a window while you work is sometimes much easier than watching TV on your TV that is 10 - 20 feet away from your PC. Unfortunately, a program guide for my area was unavailable, so none of that information is filled out in the picture above. However, it is quite clear that the interface is very clean, working much like some DSS programming guides. 

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