Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Winfast DTV Dongle..watch telly on your lappy

This is a nifty little gadget, I bought one for myself recently so I could watch a bit of TV during those late late nights working.
Its a little USB dongle that lets you watch Digital TV on your computer - so long as your computer's got the grunt and you have a decent signal .. no problems! I found my laptop wasnt actually able to handle this and dropped frames.. so I moved it to a spare desktop. It seems to be 'just' powerful enough.. and works well (but not with the included antenna, I had to add a larger external antenna to get a decent signal - so the size of the dongle is amost irrelivent if you have to carry around an huge arial). I would say it works well, but not brilliantly - on my desktop pc, if the control panel box overlays the picture, the picture slows down to a crawl, like it just doesnt have enough grunt to carry it out smoothly.. I also cant get a smooth picture with HDTV, only Standard - it seems to skip frames - it is probably just a factor of the machine I have it on which is a server spec with only 256mb ram and a less than powerful graphics card - so I assume on a decent spec machine you wouldnt get the problems I have had. Even with these minor problems I'm still very happy with it.. I paid AUD$110 which is about half what other external DTV computer receivers cost & the picture quality is great!

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