Brand: VBox EAN: 0729001046113 Feature: Package Contents - Cats Eye-150 PCI HDTV tuner card, Beyond TV-SE with Lifetime EPG subscription to a 14 day EPG, FireFly RF Remote control and RF receiver, Installation Guide, BDA Drivers Label: VBox Communications Manufacturer: VBox Communications Publisher: VBox Communications Studio: VBox Communications
Features
Package Contents - Cats Eye-150 PCI HDTV tuner card, Beyond TV-SE with Lifetime EPG subscription to a 14 day EPG, FireFly RF Remote control and RF receiver, Installation Guide, BDA Drivers Designed for Microsoft XP Watch, Pause, Record live TV Receive Free to-air HDTV Supports complete standard Low Profile design fits into all cases
Editorial Reviews:
Watch, Pause and Automatically Record High Definition Television on your XP Computer with Beyond TV. Now watch HDTV the way HDTV was meant to be watched. Now you can watch, pause and automatically record your favorite shows and sporting events in Free to-air HDTV when you use an Optional HDTV antenna, with this USB Tuner and PC Magazines Editors Choice Beyond TV. The fully Integrated FireFly RF remote control lets you do it all from the comfort of your chair. Turn your home computer into a HDTV Digital PVR with no monthly subscription costs. The VBox Cats Eye USB is a low profile HDTV tuner card that receives the highest quality digital television transmissions allowing you to utilize all the PVR power of BeyondTV. This top quality tuner locks on to even weak signals. Watching standard definition TV on your Wide Screen just makes the Pixels bigger. Watch HDTV and discover the beauty. HD transmissions have up to 6 times more pixels than the standard definition TV signal, so your Wide Screen TV can deliver a much sharper picture. System Requirements - Microsoft Windows, XP, Home, Pro, MCE, Intel Pentium, AMD Athlon TM processor at 1.7 GHz or higher, 512 MB RAM, DirectX 9.0 or greater, Graphics Card - nVidia GeForce 2 and above or ATI Radeon 7500 and above, Free PCI slot, Antenna with coaxial cable ending in F connector Dimensions - Height 2.56 x Length 6.60 x Height 0.57 inch, 6.5 x 16.78 x 1.44 cm
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: HDTV DVR Comment: I am using this product to watch and record high defininition and digital TV from over the air broadcasts using a UHF antenna. I am happy with the product and recommend it for anyone wanting to watch and record HDTV or DTV broadcasts to their PC.
The HDTV tuner, remote control, and The Beyond TV software are great. I like the Beyond TV interface, search features, and the search capabilities; like a cable TV guide or almost TIVO-like functionality. I have found programs to record that I like that is on at weird times that I record and watch and had no idea that it was on at all before I used Beyond TV. I upgraded Beyond TV for free from the version 4.1 that shipped to the 4.5 version as there are some minor bugs they fixed according to their web site [...]. You must have some significant hard drive space to record to as it uses about 8.6 GB for every hour recorded (MPEG-2 format). I am considering purchasing the new DVD Burning plug-in for [...] to free up hard drive space.
I had some trouble getting the remote to work properly and had to go to the manufacturers web site [...] to get the latest version of firefly.
The sytem requirements were not very clear on either Amazon's site, or on VBox Communications' site or with what shipped with the product. My PC is able to use this hardware/software but I almost did not buy this because of the lack of clear system requirements. Here are the conflicting specifications that shipped with the product:
1) Minimum Recommended System Requirements:
(from Quick Installation Guide)
2.4 GHz Pentium IV Processor (or AMD equivalent)
512 MB RAM
200GB hard disk space free (for recording HDTV Content)
PCI Slot (Half Size)
Audio Card compliant with Microsoft DirectX 9.0c and above
Graphics Card, 128MB DDR Memory and above, nVidia GeoForce FX 5200 or ATI Radeon 9550 or above
Microsoft Windows XP SP2
Internet Access, enabled (for Beyond TV Guide)
CD-ROM Drive
For Firefly Remote Control, a free USB port
2) Minimum Recommended System Requirements:
(from outside box)
Microsoft Windows XP (Home, Pro, MCE)
256 MB RAM
DirectX 9.0 or greater
Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 2 and above or ATI Graphics Radeo 7500 and above
Available PCI Slot
Antenna
My PC meets the Minimum Recommended System Requirements from the Quick Installation Guide. In my PC, I have an nVidia GeForce (not GeForce 2) 6600 video card with 256 MB RAM and it plays the TV OK but it does seem to play recordings better than watching live TV, particularly with HDTV signals. On live TV, there seems to be some hestation in the picture at times. I just installed Beyond TV version 4.5 software and it seemed to have cleared up this problem. Despite some problems, I give this product 5 stars. Customer Rating: Summary: Nice card, v3.8 Software Comment: Great card, great remote, -just okay software. The BeyondTV software version bundled is v3.8 The newest BeyondTV release is 4.x (For a limited time, you can upgrade from this version for an extra $30).
I have owned this kit for a couple of weeks and I love the card and the remote. The picture is wonderful and the tuner is strong. However, the BeyondTV software is a little buggy and it seems like they won't even try to fix known problems.
I also get a bad feeling about the fact that they delete posts on their support forum which ask about problems they haven't fixed yet (or have no intention of fixing!)
The card is good and the RF remote is great, but I'll be buying a different brand of software.
