Kworld PlusTV Dual DVB-T PCI-E TV card

You, TV Freak

In fact, the more we fiddled with the TV card, the more problems we came across. Not being able to access teletext for unknown reasons wasn’t a massive loss, but not being able to read subtitles when we did get them to display was a major hassle.

We tried our best to grab some screenshots of what the subtitles looked like, but the screen-capture facility in Hypermedia seems to remove them automatically. That’s a great thing if you want to grab some clear screenshots of your favourite show but it isn’t so good if you want to show people what the subtitles look like. To describe them though, the subtitles look yellow and stripey, with occasional stripes missing so that each letter was partly see-through.

Yeah, not exactly the best type of subtitling for those who are have sight impairments.

What about Media Center?

We later moved onto testing the card in Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, which worked simply enough using the standard drivers supplied. There were still no Windows Vista drivers, meaning that we cannot use the updated version of Media Center. There are also no Linux drivers either for that matter, which takes MythTV out of the equation.

The built-in Media Center 2005 interface doesn't support picture-in-picture viewing, which stripped the product of some features, but we were still able to record multiple channels at the same time through the one card which is another plus. We'd certainly argue that you're more than likely going to want to use a product like this with Microsoft's interface, instead of the supplied software which isn't that great.

There was a fairly heated discussion regarding the compatibility with XP Media Center, with some of us insisting that XP Media Center 2005 is out-dated and that anybody buying a new card to run in a media centre will be moving towards Vista and others pointing out that Media Center 2005 is still the most popular solution.

Remote:

The remote control is another important factor for the card. On the one hand, the IR sensor responded very well when we used it and we didn’t have any trouble at all when we used the remote control at the normal distances and angle. However, at the same time the remote control retains a very cheap and nasty feel to it.


I’m not sure quite exactly how to describe how the remote control feels – which is an awkward thing for a professional writer to admit – but I think a lot of the cheap feel stems from the rubber buttons which are raised out of the case just a little bit too far and makes them feel vaguely revolting to use. The only word I can think to describe them with is ‘flubbery’, but my spell checker tells me that that isn’t a word.

The quality of the picture is something which will obviously depend heavily on the reception that the card is receiving, but we didn’t have any particular complaints in that regard. The picture was perhaps a little grainy, but it was still clear enough to cope with. More of a problem was the lag we were occasionally forced to suffer, which stuttered the picture and sound for a few seconds and occasionally forced the show to slow to a halt for as long as five seconds. Which didn’t exactly satisfy masterful us.

Obviously, if you're using Media Center, you're probably going to be using one of Microsoft's Media Center remotes, or of course the Media Center keyboard. Both of those are infinitely better quality than the remote supplied by Kworld.