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Leadtek WinFast PVR 2000 TV tuner card

Saturday, October 29th, 2005 | Reviews, Video Card Reviews

The WinFast PVR 2000 TV tuner card allows you to watch full screen cable or antenna TV on your desktop computer. There is a built in MPEG-2 encoder to give excellent quality with little CPU usage.

This card supports Microsoft Media Center 2005.

This card is a good choice if you are building yourself a system to be used as part of an entertainment center.

Some of the key features…

• DirectBurn
• Remote Control
• De-interlacing
• Picture-in-Picture
• Recorder wake up

DirectBurn allows you to record your favorite shows of whatever it may be straight to a DVD. Instead of taking the two steps to record to the hard drive and then to DVD, you can do it straight away.

The Remote control comes into its own when you are using the system with an entertainment center. When using it in a desktop envrionment, it may only be partly useful, but the real advantage is not having to use a mouse or keyboard.

Traditional TV signals are interlaced, which means that the screen is updated in two sweeps. It first updates all the even numbered lines and then all the odd numbered ones and so on and so forth. De-interlacing takes that signal and converts it to a higher quality non-interlaced signal, which is the kind all desktop computers use.

Picture-in-Picture allows you to preview other channels in a small frame on the screen, you can have a look whats on the other channel and then choose to change, or keep track of two channels at the same time.

Recorder wake-up makes it truly a replacement for your DVD machine. Set the time to record and the card will wake up the computer to record your shows.

As well as these, there is FM radio and ability to view image files.

Unfortunately the remote control does not fully control the software. You need a mouse to set recording times and access your files. This is a bit of a pain, but should be alright. If you need full remote capability you need to opt for something else.