If any TV card demonstrates you get what you pay for, its the Winfast TV 2000 XP RM. This was the second TV card I purchased, and in retrospect, I wish I hadn’t.

To quote the official speil

“WinFast TV2000 XP RM is the smartest and the most cost-effective way of turning your PC into a high performance multimedia entertainment center. It allows broadcast TV viewing, live video display and video communication on a PC with the finest quality and optimal performance . It also provides a quick response user friendly 49-key remote control with power on/off button, just like the one for your VCR or TV set”

The decription is accurate in regards to allowing TV viewing, but its useless with any of your favorite PVR programs such as MythTV, Media Portal or GB PVR. Even commercial offerings such as Show Shifter don’t work with this one.

To be fair, its probably not Leadteks fault, because the problem with TV cards is there is no standard for any of them. As a beginners card it does a good job. The software that ships with it displays TV well and has basic PVR features. My version is a PAL B standard with remote: the remotes reciever couldn’t be much smaller if it tried and you’ve got to be fairly close to get it to work, but it does work.

I’m going to add a short term plug for my card today because I’m flogging it on ebay: if you want to buy it you can visit the auction here. I paid something like $89 AUD for it, so with an auction starting at $1 its a bargain, but if you are looking for something that works with the big names, don’t bother. If you are looking for a basic TV card that works, I can recommend it. The auction is for Australia only, but if you are outside Australia and are interested (remember its PAL B) email me and I’ll give you a quote on the shipping.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Leadtek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.