The Tenuous Link

Internet electronics dealers have realised that if they send me emails with pictures of cute gadgets^*, then I will give them my money. I have no self control, but I do now have 25 grammes of plastic coated trickery that turns my boring old laptop in to a digital TV and VCR.

When I bought this, Windows Media Center Edition 2005 didn't yet let me listen to the Freeview radio stations (it does now), but this has its own software, which has no trouble with sound without pictures. In fact, this tuner is not recognised by MCE at all, so it can't act as a second tuner inside MCE for me. Also, for some reason it isn't using the hardware MPEG acceleration on my Via Mini-ITX home PC, and I get choppy video and audio. My 1.8 GHz Intel CPU laptop has no problem making the sound and picture play back smoothly; the laptop is also easier to carry upstairs to test the little aerial.

Hey look, that tiny aerial really works!

Cool features:

• The software shows the next week of TV and radio schedules, downloaded off the air.
• The very cute little stubby aerial actually picked up some channels perfectly downstairs in my house, and all of them upstairs. Clue to the people who think it doesn't work at all, it probably needs to be mounted horizontally, not vertically.
• It's got a diddy little remote control.
• According to the linuxtv wiki it will work with Linux
• It records TV as a standard mpg file, not dvr-ms, and it is easy to edit and burn the video to a video DVD.

Missing features:

• The teletext implementation seems to be for a type of teletext that isn't transmitted in the UK.
• No interactive features at all.
• No access to the subscription channels.

Bad features:

• Tiny little stubby aerial is really pretty unreliable in most places.
• Don't hope to get too remote with that remote control: my arm reaches further than its signal.
• The useless time shifting mode tells you "time is up" after it's filled its buffer, and stops.
• The provided software often locks moving in or out of time-shifting mode. At least it's easy to kill it using Task Manager, and then restart it.
• No software updates on the Freecom web site yet.

I don't really watch much TV though. Maybe my brother would like it for Christmas? Maybe your brother would like one too? Click here to get it cheap on amazon.co.uk.

^*That's a lie, I block images in HTML email. It was the text "DVB-T USB Stick" that caught my eye.