Recording
Recording
The live TV picture quality is superb. My old ATi card (when it used to work in Windows 98) had decent quality in a window, but trying to watch it full screen would give me a headache after awhile from the massive loss in picture quality caused by stretching a 640x480 analog broadcast to fit the 1600x1200 resolution on my 22” monitor. Not so with the Leadtek. Windowed, the quality is able to rival my CRT television, and its full screen performance is exceptional. There is a slight picture quality loss, but surprisingly little, I had no problems watching it full screen sitting about 2 feet away. Here's a screen shot taken at full screen as an example:
If you pay particular attention to the telephone number in this shot you can see that the numbers look pretty sharp for a stretched image. No color bleeding. Here's another:
The remote allows you to switch between window and full screen as well as opening and closing the software and switching between TV and FM sources and of course changing channels and stations, so as long as your computer is running you don’t have to even touch it to watch TV or listen to the radio, which definitely comes in handy for lazy people like myself.
Where the card really comes in handy is its ability to digitally record both FM and television broadcasts. Clicking on the configuration button opens up a menu to select how and what you want to record. You can select 3 different quality levels of both Mpeg-1 and Mpeg-2 compression, but it goes much farther than that. If you really want to tweak your recording settings, you can select which video and audio codec you would like to use, for example: record Mpeg-1 Optimal quality with DivX 5 video codec and Microsoft ADPCM audio codec, and there are configuration buttons to set each codec to your exact specifications. You can also set the capture resolution, and adjust bitrate levels in Kbps. The level of available customization is incredible. Additionally a scheduling menu allows you to record even when you aren’t around.
The FM mode is a little simpler. You can scan for strong stations or fine tune in increments of .05 Mhz. You can also set up to ten presets and name them. There are still quite a few options to record FM digitally to the hard drive. There are three different types of .wav compression, or you can record in .wma format. Additionally you fine tune each one of these. Here’s a possible example: Compression format – PCM (.wav) 44.1khz, 16-bit stereo. Again the level of customization options is amazing. You can also schedule FM recordings just like you can with TV.
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