The increasing consumer desire to watch TV shows on demand, combined with the proliferation of home theater PCs (HTPC), has given rise to the AVerTVHD Duet – a pure HD Dual Digital TV tuner for your PC that lets you watch one show while recording another or record both simultaneously. And, by recording your HD content to your HTPC's hard drive, it becomes a personal video recorder (PVR): you can time-shift your favorite shows, skip annoying bits, pause and rewind, you know the drill …
Compatible with Windows 7, the manufacturer says this tuner will take your HTPC to improved levels of high definition digital entertainment by letting you record free-to-air HD TV and unencrypted digital cable (ClearQAM) content - but only up 1080i.
“If you have an available PCI-E slot, you can install a second tuner and record up to four different programs simultaneously, while viewing any of the four programs," said Dominic Wong, AverMedia’s Senior Technical Manager. That’s serious TV addiction.
On the odd chance that there are four things on TV at the same time that you want to watch, this is one way to do it. Just make sure you’ve got enough storage space on your PC to collect all that HD content.
The AVerTVHD Duet has a single input, which adopts the PCI Express interface, and offers a stable and higher bandwidth transmission environment than the traditional PCI bus.
There is also a picture-in-picture (PIP) function for those who are able to work and watch TV at the same time (there’s even a transparent PIP so you don’t cover anything on your desktop that you may be working on).
Digital Sound and Closed Caption are two other features available. In addition, with advanced H.264 recording compression technology, users can directly record TV shows into 320 x 240 resolution, upload and play them on an iPod/PSP or any other portable media player.
- Specifications
*With Windows XP MCE 2005, an Analog TV Tuner & Certified MPEG-2 Decoder is required.The AVerTVHD Duet retails for USD$89.99.