Compro VideoMate H900 TV Tuner

[Steve]

It's time for us to take a look at another product from Compro, indeed another TV tuner, the VideoMate H900.

However, this time around there are a few differences. Firstly, the H900 is a PCI card rather than a USB tuner. Secondly, it's an analogue tuner. "What!," we hear you shout. You read correctly, no DVB-T in this review, we're afraid. That will immediately kill the interest of a number of you. However, there are a couple of features that still make this card worth a look

http://lifestyle.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6442

[BigBry]

For cable, Sky or Sky+ capture into a HTPC the main choice is the Hauppauge 150 or the Sweetspot. Since ones under £50 and the other £150 this could be an interesting mid-range card?

I didn't read in the review about MCE compatibility?

It would be interesting to know how capture via s-video from Sky or Cable works and the quality of image? Does it suffer from the audio delays the Hauppauge does in such circumstances if you feed the sound into the PC or amp, not the card?

[Silent Shark]

If you want all these features in a DVB-T card, get the Compro T200 or T300. They have power on/off ability. I don't know about hardware encoding, but I've never had any recording performance issues (I've not checked CPU usage to see how much is being used though). It is also MCE compatible.

I've been very impressed with Compro products. We own 3 (A T300 in my PC, a T200 in my dads PC, and a PVR/FM in my brothers PC), and all of them are excellent. If Compro made a DVB-S card, I'd be very interested. (EDIT: Turns out that they do!)

[Steve]

If you want all these features in a DVB-T card, get the Compro T200 or T300. They have power on/off ability. I don't know about hardware encoding, but I've never had any recording performance issues.

With DVB-T it's already 'encoded'. Just pull the MPEG-2 from the MPEG-TS and wrap it in a new file container.

[BigBry]

I'm not talking about Freeview! I'm comparing it to the other commonly used analogue capture cards (which this is). Even though the T200 and 300 have s-video inputs they won't work under MCE.

My points were just around this possibly being another device in the MCE analogue market, something which will remain necessary for many people for some time yet.