Accessories, specifications

The box of Aver's typical colors contains a device looking like a ladybird, a cable for connection to a sound card, a CD with drivers and other software and a manual in English. The tuner displays "SECAM D/K", though the box lacks for it. 

One of the circles on the ladybird is a button, though it might seem that all of them are buttons. The connectors hidden behind are standard: antenna, video and S-video inputs, and audio-out. Well, the first downside is a missing audio-in, which means that you can't use a video camera or VCR comfortably, - you will need to reconnect an audio cable, which is not standard at that. 

What it must do (information from the Aver's site with my comments):

• Show TV on the monitor 
• Scaling from 1/4 to full screen. (it turned out that nothing prevents making it smaller than 1/4.) 
• 181 channels support. (In case of a cable television.) 
• Childproof (to protect access to certain channels.) 
• Preview of 16 channels. (The screen is divided into 4x4 fields and the tuner switches from one field to another in turn. It's convenient when you don't know what to watch.) 
• Channel number direct input. 
• Auto search of channels. 
• Image/Video Capture. 
• Motion JPEG and RGB 24 supported. 
• Video capture up to 30 fps. (And the resolution corresponding to 30 fps is, for some reason, not specified...) 
• Coaxial, video and S-video inputs. 
• Capture in 640x480. (not a single word on quality.) 
• Adjustment of brightness, contrast, colors. 
• Choice of a video source and a video standard. (The latter obviously excludes an antenna input.) 
• Power supply from the USB-port. 
• Audio-out - mono. 

Installation

Test system: 

• P4 Celeron 1800 MHz 
• EPOX 4BEA (i845E) 
• 512 DDR RAM PC2100 
• nVidia GeForce256 32 MB SDRAM noname 
• Full-screen mode tested in 1152x864 
• Windows XP Service Pack 1 

Installation under the Windows XP with the program supplied on the CD (v.2.10) fails. The drivers can't be installed or they are installed incorrectly. After the manual installation of the driver from \Drivers\WIN2000 everything works without problems and the red LED on the ladybird goes on. The only thing you have to do is to connect an audio cable to the line-in of the audio card and the audio-out of the tuner and an antenna cable. If you use a collective antenna, remember that your computer can burn; besides, do not touch the antenna cable and the computer simultaneously as it feels not very pleasant :). The problem can be solved by using your own antenna, though it can have negative consequences during thunderstorm... 

Tests

The scanning is quite fast - 1-2 channels a second. However, a usual PCI AverTvPhone98 has it the same. Obviously, it has a scanning algorithms different from other tuners I have tested. For example, when a channel is detected, the tuner fulfills fine adjustment, that is why the process slows down on working channels. Intermediate values relative to the frequency grid can be lost at such approach, - who knows how the Taiwanese picture our frequencies. 

Now a little on the controls.

• Above you can find a window where you can choose a channel group; by default it's an external antenna and cable TV, they are called standard below. 
• "Scan" button will start up the process of scanning channels listed below. The ticks indicate enabled channels, and you can text in any channel in the line nearby. 
• Insert, Delete and Rename buttons work with a channel groups, except standard ones which can't be changed or deleted. 
• Remap will interchange channels. It can be useful to make the order of channels more convenient for you. 
• Fine tune. 
• All Channel Scan - this proves the above theory about fast channel search. It shows a picture looking really like scanning a frequency range. At the same time, you can be sure that every corner of the frequency range occupied by television will be paid due attention to. This process is not bound to the channel grid, and numeration of channels on completion of the scanning will hardly coincide with the one accepted in a given region. 
• Color Adjust - adjustment of brightness, contrast, colors (and balance in NTSC). It applies to all channels. 
• Video Standard Setup - surprisingly, you can set a video standard separately for video-ins. (Except the antenna-in which is always SECAM). 
• TV Frame - here you can choose how to decorate the program. 
• Video Buffer Setup - here you can set playback parameters. You can tick off problem elimination - this will disable screen anti-aliasing and tell negatively on the image quality. Also, you can choose a working resolution: 320x240 or 640x480. At a higher resolution fps changes. But the resolution hardly improves... 
• Image Sequence Capture - it helps to set parameters for the button on the ladybird's body. You can set how many frames are to be captured (up to 30) and in what intervals (from 1 to 15 seconds). 

The tuner supports the USB 1.1 bus whose throughput is about 1.5 MB/s. We need 25 frames, i.e. 60 KB per frame ideally. What can be put into 60 KB? A frame of 320 x 240 with 1 byte per each of three main colors will make 230 KB without compression... It means that either frames are compressed or some of them are dropped. In this case they use compression.