AVerMedia intros AVerTV Hybrid USB analog / digital HD tuner

AVerMedia's no stranger to taking brave new steps in the TV tuning arena, and this time around its delving into high-definition with the AVerTV Hybrid Ultra USB. This USB-based breakout tuner handles both analog (NTSC) and digital (ATSC) HD OTA broadcasts, is compatible with Windows XP, XP Media Center Edition 2005, and Windows Vista Premium, and touts its very own MPEG-2 hardware encoding solution to boot. Additionally, the device is bundled with an MCE-compatible remote to control the action from afar, and it also enables the obligatory PVR action whilst supporting resolutions up to 1080i and both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios. Furthermore, users can expect to pull in FM radio transmissions when not tuning into televised programming, and while we've certainly seen more compact ways to deliver a USB 2.0 tuner before, AVerMedia's latest is available nevertheless for $129.99.

[Ihar `Philips` Filipau @ Apr 11th 2007 11:48AM]

Uhm. (Not) funny question: does it work at all?

I have tried to own several AVerMedia products in past and they all sucked very much due to extremely buggy drivers. e.g. their TV tuners were routinely crashing Windows and remote control was working only half of time - due to lots of conflicts with other installed applications.

Does it really work?

[Jeff @ Apr 11th 2007 12:25PM]

Why would it have hardware *encoding*? I'm pretty sure you guys mean it has hardware *decoding*, which is a nice thing to have in an HD tuner, and most other devices that have it cost a lot more than this.

There's no reason for an HD tuner to need to encode something to mpeg2 that's already encoded to mpeg2.

[Phoenixfury @ Apr 11th 2007 1:27PM]

Hello Jeff. I'm thinking the encoding is for the DVR although it is also used during playback during live television as well. I'm thinking that over the air digital is broadcast in MPEG2, but you know MS has to have their way, therefore anything recorded in Media Center is re-encoded into DVR-MS files. For that reason you would need a hardware encoder to work on the fly to re-encode that raw MPEG2 signal coming into your computer.

[Jeff @ Apr 11th 2007 12:27PM]

Er, realized after my comment that maybe it does hardware encoding for NTSC broadcasts. Useless for the HD stuff then, though.

[Bob Cook @ Apr 11th 2007 1:52PM]

I'm just about to return an AVerMedia TV tuner as every time you change channel it places a big AVerMedia white and blue logo in the corner covering a 1/4 of the screen.

I wonder if this will have the same "feature".

[Kev50027 @ Apr 11th 2007 3:28PM]

But.. how does it recieve HD content? It needs HDMI in.. nobody uses S-video anymore.

[AJRitz @ Apr 11th 2007 5:05PM]

It's designed for OTA HD content - it has two 75 ohm digital TV antenna inputs.