Desktop Tube
Forget Web surfing--channel surfing may be the up-and-coming computer sport.
Numerous products are taking advantage of increasingly fast computers and vast hard drives to turn personal computers into television sets and video recorders.
With a combination PC TV, you can have CNBC (or “All My Children”) playing in a window as you work (or play solitaire). With some products, you can pause live TV and record shows on your hard drive--much as you can with TiVo and ReplayTV personal video recorders.
A PC TV is ideal for businesspeople who want to keep an eye on the news (or the soaps) from their cubicles, and it makes space-saving sense for college dorm rooms.
But if you’re interested in recording TV shows, be forewarned: The intersection of television and personal computers is still a construction zone. No TV software I tested was as friendly and foolproof as a TiVo or ReplayTV box. If you simply want the joys of pausing live TV and skipping commercials, buy one of those devices instead of trying to coerce your PC into acting like one.
The first step in turning a computer into a television is to add TV tuner hardware. Several companies sell TV tuner cards that install in a PC’s expansion slot, including ATI Technologies Inc., Hauppauge Digital Inc., Pinnacle Systems Inc., Matrox Electronic Systems and Avermedia Technologies Inc. Some companies also sell external tuners that connect to a PC’s Universal Serial Bus port and work with laptops.
I tested a high-end card--ATI Technologies’ Windows-only Radeon 8500DV. This $399 card combines a TV tuner, fast video display circuitry and FireWire jacks to which you can connect a digital camcorder or other FireWire device. ATI’s $199 Radeon 7500 provides similar TV features but lacks FireWire.
Both cards include software that lets you tune in to TV broadcasts, pause live TV, record shows on your hard drive and display closed captions.
The cards also access an online program guide that displays local listings and lets you select shows for recording.
Both ATI cards include remote controls that let you control TV functions and launch your Web browser. The remotes use wireless radio links so you can change the channel from the living room even if your PC TV is in the den.
ATI’s TV software takes advantage of closed captions in a clever way. You can have the software save the caption text on your hard drive, complete with occasional freeze-frame video images, to create an illustrated transcript of a TV show. Try that with your VCR.
One problem with the ATI system is that there is no easy way to watch your recorded programs on another computer. You can transfer video files over a network, but with some shows that could take hours, given the size of the files.
The solution is to install a nifty piece of software from SnapStream Media called SnapStream PVS. This $50 Windows program takes a video file and streams it, bit by bit, to any computer on a network.
It works with most TV tuner hardware. SnapStream also sells tuner-and-software bundles for as little as $89.
Like ATI’s software, SnapStream lets you record programs on your hard drive. But SnapStream PVS also sports a built-in server that lets you watch recorded programs from any PC or Mac running Microsoft’s Windows Media Player software. I recorded some shows on my Windows XP machine and then watched them in a different room using my Apple PowerBook, which is connected via a wireless network.
I was also able to watch recorded shows over the Net while away from home. It was dazzlingly cool, even if the Internet video was a bit grainy and jerky.
TV features are not as extensive on the Macintosh. Several companies, including ATI and Eskape Labs, sell USB-based external TV tuners. But none includes personal video recorder software, and none works under the new Mac OS X.
The Mac may be a major force in TV production, but for desktop couch potatoes, Windows is where the action is.
