Put multi-format TV on your laptop

Product: AVerTV Hybrid Express Slim - XpressCard TV Tuner
Vendor: AVer Media Taiwan
website: www.avermedia.com

WHEN TRAVELLING around the globe, we all want to watch TV on our laptops - don't we? Well OK, maybe not. Still, it's not a bad idea just to see what movies or shows are screening on local channels, just for fun.

Taiwanese Aver Media has been meddling in this market for quite a while, and now came out with an XpressCard format device for all those brand new Santa Rosa-based notebook with such slots.

The sleek slim card barely protrudes from the laptop chassis once inserted, helping prevent accidental chip-offs. Yet, it still manages to pack two parallel sets of connectors - one to take in composite & S-video signal from, say, cable TV boxes, and the other one for either fixed or long wire 75 Ohm TV antenna free to air signal. You could receive the ATSC standard HDTV signal as well over the antenna - this card supports full HD TV playback too, a big plus in parts of the US and Far East at least.

Having these two on line simultaneously is a benefit if, for instance, some of the neighbouring country's free to air channels are not available on the local cable box. In Singapore, that's the case with most Malaysia and Indonesia channels.

After installing the card, you can proceed to put on the software supplied: a driver - stated to be compatible with Windoze XP, MCE and Vista - as well as AverTV 6 (literally a TV box equivalent) and Aver MediaCenter. Keep in mind that these do conflict with Windoze MCE / Vista "media center mode" files, so those have to be disabled prior to running Aver software. Why couldn't Aver simply do that for the user during installation anyway, we wonder.

We tried it on a MSI PR200 thin and light dual-core Intel Core 2 2.0 FSB800 GHz Santa Rosa notebook with integrated graphics and WXGA screen, on both WinXP 32 and Vista 64.

On WinXP 32, the TV tuner and full fledged media center software worked fine, finding pretty much all the TV channels available free to air, including the abovementioned Malaysia and Indonesia channels - once we spread the wire antenna all over the window. Even the channel searching routine displays the same "TV screen noise" as on real TV sets - see the picture.

Once installed, we can record the contents in MPEG2, MPEG4 or H.264, watch multiple channels using PIP picture in picture, do time shifting or take snapshots. Nothing really special, but it all seems to work - and, mostly with just one button click.

We installed the same under Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit on the same system. The installation was flawless just as before, and I started the AverTV 6 TV tuner to find TV channels. The usual noise screen displayed, a few channels were found, then the system froze. A hard restart was needed. Again, the same run, and the same problem. Disabling the one media centre DLL in Vista didn't help either. We didn't have a 32-bit Vista to try on, so couldn't determine if the compatibility problem was due to Vista 64-bitness or some other factor.

In summary, an excellent, slim yet full feature, TV tuner add-on for WinXP equipped notebooks with XpressCard slots. The problem is, many of those notebooks actually come with Vista - unless the user's mutiny results in Micro$oft restoring the XP.

As we're just about to reformat the MSI notebook and put Ubuntu or Suse 10.3 on it, we'd suggest Aver Media looks into 64-bit, Vista, Linux and Mac OS X support.

The Good Full functionality in a minimal form factor, H DTV-enabled
The Bad Has problems with 64-bit Vista
The Ugly No Linux, Mac driver at all

Bartender's Verdict