Spurned on by the events from October 2011, I decided to write about why my success rates with TV Reciever Dongles hasn't been the great triumph I had been hoping for.
As long as I have had a computer I have dabbled in ways of recording live television onto my PC. Over the years, I have purchased several items of hardware with varying degrees of success but none of them really achieved the level that I was hoping for, although some did get quite close.
When I record a programme on my DVD Recorder I have to burn it to a DVD-RW and then rip the programme from the disc to my PC to edit and burn to DVD-R. Wouldn't it be so much easier to record programmes straight to the PC? Well, I've tried and here are some of the different issues that I've had over the years:
Initially, I had owned two analogue TV cards but these were for watching television only. The PCs I owned at this time would not have been powerful enough to have recorded from them.
The first real sucess I had was when I was using a Canopus ADVC-50 (below) with a Sony Digital reciever hooked up to it. The ADVC-50 is the item that I have used to convert the vast majority of VHS recordings to digital video.
This actually worked but there were several drawbacks:
- I would have to be around to start the recording. No timer recording was possible and no EPGs to help out.
- I had to hope that my PC, running XP at the time, would not suffer from the infamous Black-Screen Bug which stopped XP seeing the ADVC-50's input. Many a frantic re-boot was carried out so as not to miss the beginning of a programme.
- Once recorded, the file would be massive. I would have to further re-encode the video, using TMPGnc Plus 2.5 so that it would fit onto a DVD-R. With the power of the PC I had at the time, this could take hours.
It was a few years later that I was given my first TV receiver dongle: A Seal USB Digital TV Adapter. I have to say that this wasn't that bad. It came with a cut down version of Arcsoft TotalMedia3 which recorded a nice picture. The software also allowed the user to apply different recording quality settings: HQ, SQ, LP etc.
However (and there's always a however), it couldn't record cleanly as there would always be a jump somewhere in the video. Although, this could have been the ability of the PC I was using at the time: A Pentium 4, 3Ghz on a XP machine.
Above is one of the screen shots I took using this dongle from December 2008.
I then obtained a Kworld TV dongle from Maplins. The item stated that it could record HD. It couldn't. Not in the UK anyway. Still, after that disappointment it did pick up more channels, than the Seal device, but the TV software was horriffic.
Nothing to worry about as Windows Media Center came to the rescue. Except that the picture quality was also horriffic. The picture would be full of mpeg artifacts. I understand that TV dongles only record the transport stream from the freeview signal but somehow the poor picture quality didn't happen with the Seal device although this would appear to be down to Arcsoft.
I knew about the NanoStick T290e, the first dongle to recieve High-Definition channels, for a while but was put off by the minimun specifications that were required.
Eventually, I decided to go for it and initial use was favourable. The software, PCTV Center, that came with the device wasn't the best I'd come accross. Although not as poor as the KWorld's, it had terrible problems with the BBCHD channel. Windows Media Center came to the rescue again.
Watching HD television on my PC, using the NanoStick with WMC, was excellent; a nice steady picture.
However, Recording in HD, which was the whole point in having this item, was a huge problem: choppy recordings and PC crashes abounded.
I've had to file this under 'future hardware' and will return to this device when I get a much more powerful computer (and one which I can rely on).
It seems that my PC has settled down and at the time of writing this I have managed to record two complete programmes in HD. Of course, this isn't ultimate proof that all is well but it is a step in the right direction.
I just have the issue of being able to play them on my living room television...