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  Jetway USB TV Station

  Ameya Dalvi, Mar 11, 2003 0000 hrs IST

  A modest external TV tuner with a built-in FM tuner.

  FM tuner/recorder, Ease of use

  Poor picture quality, Choice of file formats to store captured video and audio

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What do you do if you wish to have a TV tuner card but have run out of PCI slots, or if you wish to buy one for the laptop? Simple! Buy an external TV tuner. It's a common belief that external TV tuners are to internal TV tuners what external modems are to internal modems. Not really. Not just yet. The culprit being the USB 1.1 bus. Let me explain.

In case of the internal TV tuners, the data is processed by the TV tuner and passed to the CPU via the PCI bus. The PCI bus has a maximum bandwidth of 133 MBps, which is more than sufficient for transferring high quality video. In case of external TV tuners, the tuner box does the data crunching, but the data is transferred to the CPU via the USB 1.1 bus, which has a maximum bandwidth of 1.2 MBps. This serves as a serious bottleneck. So in order to provide a decent frame rate, the maximum resolution supported by the external TV tuners is about 320 x 240 pixels, thus compromising on picture quality.

The Jetway USB TV Station is based on the same technology. The package we received comprised of the external TV tuner box, an infrared remote control, an audio cable, an information leaflet, a FM antenna and a driver/software CD. The software provided with the card is very basic with limited features, but should suffice most of the users. On the brighter side, the user interface is as simple as it gets and even a novice would not have any trouble using it.

At first glance, the Jetway USB TV Station appears like an external modem. The remote sensor is located inside the box at the front. The back panel comprises of the audio in and out sockets, AV In and S-Video In connectors and the sockets for the FM and TV antenna. There is a small button on the TV tuner box, which is used to take snap shots. It connects to the PC through a USB 1.1 port. The remote control supplied has a good variety of functions, but has an average build quality. Some of the buttons tend to get stuck in the grooves and that is really irritating at times.



The setup was a bit tricky. When connected, Windows XP detects it as an Intel USB camera. You need to go to Device Manager and install the drivers manually. It works perfectly fine after that. The detailed instructions for doing the same are provided in a Word document on the driver CD.

The performance of the card didn't spring any surprises. We had not expected it to do anything fancy. The picture wasn't sharp at all in full screen mode. It supported a maximum resolution of 320 x 240 pixels in NTSC and 352 x 288 pixels in PAL mode. It has an auto-tuner, which scans and stores over 70 mutually exclusive channels, something that's standard with most TV tuner cards. Though as usual, the number of channels depends on your local Cable guy. The video can be captured at a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. There is no option to change the resolution, but you can adjust the frame rate between 1 to 30 frames. The captured clips are stored in an uncompressed format thus consuming disk space.

It has a built-in FM tuner. The quality of reception is very decent, thanks mainly to the telescopic antenna provided with the package. One interesting feature that the Jetway USB TV Station supports is the ability to record FM music. The music is stored in WAV format and not in MP3.

To conclude, I can say that the Jetway USB TV Station is an average product. The picture quality is not comparable to that of an internal TV tuner card, but it is at par with its external counterparts. We, however, are not pointing fingers at Jetway as the USB 1.1 bus is the problem child. This problem will continue till we get TV tuners based on the USB 2.0 or FireWire interface where the transfer speeds of 50 MBps and above are attainable. Priced at Rs.5000/-, we would advice you to opt for this external TV tuner only if you wish to use it with a Laptop or there's no free PCI slot. Else Internal TV tuners rule.

Unit sourced from Kunhar Peripherals Pvt. Ltd.

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