Package Contents - Cats Eye USB HDTV USB Box, USB 2.0 Cable, Installation Guide, BDA Drivers Designed for Microsoft XP Watch, Pause, Record live TV Receive Free to-air HDTV Supports complete standard Easy to connect - Plug in USB connector
Now you can watch, pause and automatically record your favorite shows and sporting events in HDTV with this USB TV tuner and popular PVR software such as BeyondTV, SageTV Meedio TV, and Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Turn your home computer into a HDTV digital PVR with no monthly subscription costs. The VBox Cats Eye USB is a HDTV - ATSC tuner that receives the highest quality digital television transmissions allowing you to utilize all the PVR power of BeyondTV, SageTV, Meedio TV, and MCE. The Cats Eye USB ships with a set of advanced BDA drivers, allowing it to reliably work with several top quality PVR programs. Simply attach the antenna to the tuner box and plug the supplied USB cord into the computer. This top quality tuner locks on to even weak signals. Enjoy the dazzling beauty of free HDTV Movies, Shows and Sports that are available today without cable subscription costs. Automatically time shift your viewing to the times most convenient for you. Watch the SuperBowl and the World Series like you've never seen them before. Compact design - Mounts horizontally or vertically RF Input - Coaxial IEC 75 female RF Loop Through - Coaxial IEC 75 male RF Input Impedance - 75 OHm Reception Frequency - 55.25 MHz to 859.25 MHz Channel Bandwidth - 6 MHz Input Sensitivity - Min. 84dBm Dynamic Range - More than 82 dB White Noise Threshold of Errors - Less than 15.3 dB AGC Speed - More than 600H Interface Protocol - USB 2.0 compliant up to 480 Mbps ATSC digital 8VSB and 16VSB Decoding - Reed - Solomon Reed Solomon Outer Code - (207, 187) Power Supply - 5V DC (From USB), 2.5 W max USB-B receptacle RF ?F' type female System Requirements - Microsoft Windows XP, Home, Pro, MCE, USB 2.0 socket, Antenna with coaxial cable ending in F connector, Application software such as Microsoft MCE, Pre-installed MCE 2005 Certified Analog TV Tuner Card, Graphics card per XP-MCE requir
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: Hardware fine, but no software Comment: Warning --- Unlike most ATSC (HDTV) tuners this tuner (AMP0674 Cats Eye USB HDTV Tuner) comes with no software! It can be run with the HDTV software built into Windows' Media Center Edition (MCE) computers, but meeting the requirements of MCE can be difficult.
I have a relatively new Window's MCE computer, but I can't get it to run this tuner. Researching I found that (I know this is hard to believe!) Window's MCE will not run a (digital) ATSC tuner unless you already have an (analog) NTSC tuner installed. Well I have an NTSC tuner on my computer (Hauppauge USB), but MCE doesn't see it. A search of the Hauppauge web site shows that only some of their models run under MCE and mine is not included. So (apparently) the MCE requirement is not only do you need an NTSC tuner, but you need an MCE approved NTSC tuner!
If you shut down MCE (a techy thing to do), you can run this tuner on two expensive media packages: BeyondTV and SageTV. Both offer their software on a trial basis. With BeyondTV software I get about 22 channels in a suburb of Boston and a beautiful picture. The response of the BeyondTV software is, however, sluggish.
After I bought the Vbox bare tuner for $80 from Amazon, I found that this same tuner is also sold by Amazon with bundled software (scaled down version of BeyondTV) and a remote control for $[...], or $[...] more.
I emailed Vbox and they provided the link below where you can buy what appears to be the version of BeyondTV they bundle. I bought it and with shipping & handling it came to $[...]. But note this is software only, no remote, so clearly the bundled package available on Amazon is the best deal.
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