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This review is the second in a series of product reviews written by the SnapStream community members. This review is of the Avermedia A180 ATSC PCI TV tuner card written by ZetaVu, a member of the SnapStream community since December 2005 with more than 1,000 posts in our forums. In addition to reviewing the Avermedia A180, ZetaVu, briefly compares the card to the Hauppauge HVR-1600.

The Avermedia A180 is one of the more affordable PCI HDTV capture cards available. Originally made for MCE systems, Avermedia has since released drivers and a TV program to work with XP installations. I have been using mine for about six months now and have been extremely pleased with the performance.

Card info

The card will capture at 480p, 720p and 1080i, with widescreen support. Minimum CPU is a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz. It requires 256 MB RAM or higher, at least a 64MB video card with Directx 9, and of course a PCI slot (which are really becoming a rare commodity on motherboards these days).

One issue I’ve run into occasionally is with the way motherboards assign IRQ’s to PCI slots. Ideally you want this card in a slot that isn’t shared with other heavy drain components. On my ECS K7S5A, slot 2 or 4 are safe, slot 1 (shared with my AGP port) definitely causes stability issues. I haven’t seen any difference on any of my three PCI slots on my ASROCK 939Dual-Vsta board. I have noticed that both my A180 and my Hauppauge PVR-250 cards seem to drop frames more often on my ASROCK motherboard, but not enough to cause major concerns. If you have issues with this or any capture card in a particular PCI slot, I suggest trying other slots first.

Here are the input signal specifications from the Avermedia website:

» Input frequency range: 54MHz to 864 MHz
» Channel bandwidth: 6MHz
» Channels assignment: US standard
» Input signal level: -80dBm to -20dBm (8-VSB)
» Input impudence: 75 ohms
» Warranty: 1 year limited parts & labor
» Compliance: FCC Class B, CE

Looking at the back of the card you see one coaxial input for the HD antenna, an S-Video input, and three RCA inputs, video and stereo audio. In addition to ATSC capture, the A180 offers SD capture using either an S-Video or composite. I tried this out initially, planning to use this as a second input for satellite television, but unfortunately the SD capture is software, not hardware encoded. This resulted in a general loss in quality on my Beyond TV playback. When I had both software and hardware capture cards setup, Beyond TV defaulted playback quality to the lower setting, leading to choppy playback from software and hardware encoded cards alike. However if someone was interested in using this card to capture SD as well, you would not be able to record HD and SD content simultaneously as the card is only a single not dual tuner. I recommend using the card strictly as a single HDTV over the air (OTA) tuner.

Unlike some cards, there are no issues with using multiple ATSC cards on a system. The A180 does not support QAM recording, and while BeyondTV currently doesn’t support QAM recording later versions probably will. This would be an issue for people who do not have good OTA reception and rely on cable for their OTA channels. Most cable companies only make local channels available without encryption, so if you’re like me and have good OTA reception, this should not be an issue.

Test System

I’ve run this card on two systems, and it worked remarkably well on both. Both systems used this card strictly for HDTV capture and a Hauppauge PVR-250 for SD capture. For my PVR-250, I use coaxial input for SD quality OTA local channels and an S-Video input for my satellite receiver. Common to both systems is my 400W Allied Model AL-400atx, which 3.3v has 28A, 5v has 40A and 12V has 17A. This is more than most 450W power supplies have and has not given me any trouble no matter what I throw at it. Most stability issues can be solved by improving your poser supply. I use a custom built serial control cable for my RCA DirecTV receiver, and an ATI Remote Wonder with Girder as a remote. I have an NEC 3500 DVD burner and three IDE hard drives totaling 720 GBs.

My initial build was an ECS K7S5A with an Athalon XP2000+ processor, 1024 MB DDR memory, with an ATI All in Wonder 7500 AGP video card (I disabled the capture on that card since it also used a software encoder). Now this video card is definitely below the minimum specifications for HDTV, however I am able to use it by virtue of the ATI mpeg decoder that comes with their MultiMedia Center. Any other decoder would be extremely choppy in playback while the ATI is clear. On this board, LiveHDTV was the most difficult task, raising my CPU usage to 70%. If I skipped foreword or backward, CPU usage peaked out at 100% and the A180 would drop frames, resulting in skips and freezes in the recording. I blame this on my undersized system and not the card itself.

My current build is an ASROCK 939DUAL-Vsta, socket 939, with an AMD dual core X2 3800+ and 1024MB paired Kingston KVR400512R memory. I got this board since it supported both AGP and PCIe cards, and if I really wanted I could upgrade to AM2 with an option card. My current setup still uses my ATI 7500 card. With the new dual core processor, navigation in HD recordings was no longer an issue. I could skip, pause, jump around and there was no impact on recording quality and no dropped frames. Total CPU usage in LiveHDTV is now under 20%. I also tried this system out with a new Sapphire 1600Pro PCIe card, but honestly I did not see any improvement in playback over the 7500, and was not happy with the way Beyond TV performed in clone mode with the S-Video going to my TV set. DVI out to my HannsG 19″ monitor was equivalent for both video cards.

Antenna Signal

I am lucky enough to get very strong OTA signals in my area, and can pick up eleven stations with 98% signal, and three with poor signal. The three poor stations do not pass the BeyondTV HD channel setup, but I can manually add them to have them in my lineup. One of the channels (UPN) has poor setup results but I get clear reception when I manually add it. The other two are very poor reception however they are non-English so I don’t bother. Part of the reason I get good OTA coverage is my house came with a roof mounted antenna. I simply ran some new RG6 cable to my card and signal is excellent. I also tried using an HDTV antenna mounted to my satellite dish, but signal quality was inferior to the good old fashioned roof mounted eyesore. I would guess that the bulk of issues people have with OTA HDTV cards is poor reception.

Installation

My card arrived in an OEM box, no disk or drivers, which is fine by me. I always download and install the latest drivers, as of this writing the latest and greatest is the 3.5.0.44 for XP, downloaded from http://www.aver.com/mpd/support/download/a180.html (they also have XP64, and Vista 32 and 64 drivers). The site also has recording and TV software for non-MCE systems. I used this as initial diagnostics to compare to BeyondTV, but have since uninstalled it. I only use BeyondTV for recording but have played back in multiple programs. I’ve run this card in every 4.x build of BeyondTV, and am currently running 4.6 RC3 which I have to say has been nothing short of excellent with my system.

The card is a full height PCI card. I have read comments that the coaxial input is in a difficult to reach spot and I agree. I also nearly removed the coaxial head entirely when disconnecting my cable, so be careful when connecting and disconnecting. I do not use the s-video or RCA inputs since the do not hardware encode. The A180 does not come with an antenna, and as I’ve stated I love my roof mount antenna but any HD antenna will work. Remember, signal quality if 90% of the battle.

Product Performance

As I stated before, I’ve tried this card on both an undersized system that barely qualifies for HDTV performance, and on a dual core system that barely notices when its running. On my old undersized system the only issues I can comment on is CPU usage. When running LiveHDTV and navigating, CPU spikes to 100% and I get pauses and hesitations. Also, if guideupdate is running, CPU maxes out fairly fast. Once I moved the card to my dual core system, CPU never gets close to 100% unless I’m showsqueezing. Even then, BeyondTV adjusts so that I don’t drop frames in LiveHDTV or recordings.

One note, my motherboard will occasionally drop frames in recordings from my PVR-250 and this card, but that is a motherboard communication issue, not a card issue. For the PVR-250, this can lead to incorrect video lengths in BeyondTV. For the A180, this leads to a dropped frame and nothing more. These issues can be detected and addressed using a program called VideoRedo.

Recording quality on 720p and 1080i shows is excellent. I send the signal to my 40″ Sony with S-video, and while I cannot display HD resolution on that TV, the captured signal is clear and without artifacts. If I have poor signal quality from the antenna (or a bad storm) I will see freezes and hesitations in the recording, otherwise it is digital perfect. On my 19″ DVI monitor, the recordings are even clearer. If I want to keep a recording, I can showsqueeze it to one of the High Def DIVX settings and it plays back with no artifacts.

Hardware wise, I have only one issue with this card and again that is related specifically to my motherboard. If I try to go into S3 (suspend to RAM) standby on my ASROCK 939Dual-Vsta after making an HD recording (or watching LiveHDTV) then my computer will freeze when I try to wake it. After contacting both Avermedia and ASROCK it turns out this is a driver conflict with the ASROCK board. Unfortunately, ASROCK has discontinued the 939Dual-Vsta, so they won’t be addressing it. I tried the card on another board and there was no S3 conflict.

Comparison to the Hauppauge HVR-1600

Unlike the A180, the HVR-1600 is a dual tuner card, having one HD and one SD input. The SD tuner has a coaxial and S-Video input, and is a hardware encoder. There is no composite input, and the audio comes in through a 1/8″ stereo plug like the PVR-250, so you will need an adaptor for your RCA audio cables. There is a connector on the side of the card which I haven’t explored yet. It also comes with an IR receiver and blaster. As a result, this card is a priced higher than the A180, but then again we are comparing prices of a dual tuner with an IR blaster and receiver to a single tuner card. For comparative purposes, I’m mainly going to focus on the similarities between these cards.

During system setup, BeyondTV recognizes both the HD tuner and the SD tuner, letting me setup three possible inputs, HD coaxial, SD coaxial, and S-video. I only setup HD Coaxial and S-video (I don’t need another OTA SD tuner). I did notice that HD channel setup had slightly lower results than the A180, ranging from 94-96 vs. 98% on the A180. Any channel at 94% did not automatically get selected and I had to select them myself. This could have been weather when I ran the setup. When testing in LiveHDTV, all channels came in perfectly without any skips or artifacts.

In order to use the dual tuner on the HVR-1600, you need BeyondTV 4.6 — 4.5 doesn’t support the dual tuner, you can only record one tuner at a time. I was able to record on both the ATSC and the S-Video on my HVR-1600 simultaneously in 4.6 RC3, and neither recording had any artifacts. System CPU was less than 15%. Playback was again perfect on both my TV and DVI monitor. Another thing I noticed was that my S3 standby issue I had with the A180 didn’t occur with the HVR-1600, so I will be pestering both Avermedia and ASROCK about this. In my few test recordings with the HVR-1600, I had no issues with dropped frames related to my motherboard. I plan to continue testing this over the next several weeks and will post my findings in the forums.

Now, some comments on the HVR-1600: My unit came OEM without remote, and so far I have not gotten my PVR-250 remote to work with the HVR-1600 IR receiver yet. Since I use a Remote Wonder this isn’t a big deal. The literature says the IR receiver won’t work with TV or VCR remotes, but I was able to get the PVR-250 receiver to work with a Toshiba VCR remote and hope to eventually do similar with this receiver. The installation CD that came with the card is designed for their WinTV2000 application, I suggest you go to this site for their IR receiver and blaster software, as well as IR blaster instructions. I’m not currently using the IR blaster, but I plan to experiment with it and girder once they have plug-ins for this blaster.

Another comment, the HVR-1600 IR receiver cable is almost a foot shorter than the PVR250 cable, which is unfortunate for those of us running cables through a wall (I keep my computer in a room next to my family room so it can get good ventilation and noise is not an issue). The IR blaster cable is several feet longer which is a big benefit. Also the IR plug fits in the HVR-1600 securely; my PVR-250 IR plug fit loosely and comes out all too easily.

Another point is also QAM support. The HVR-1600 currently is does not support QAM, although there are posts stating that older drivers for the card listed it as QAM capable, newer drivers seem to have dropped this. I cannot confirm any of this, but nothing in the literature discusses QAM support for this card, and again I don’t have any ways to test it.

Final Conclusions

If you are looking for an inexpensive but quality OTA HD tuner, the Avermedia A180 is a reasonably priced choice. In my opinion you can use this as a great HDTV tuner, and while it is capable of capturing SD through composite or s-video I don’t recommend it because it does not have hardware encoding. You cannot record SD from antenna with this card. The quality is just as good as what I’ve seen from the more expensive HVR-1600 card. You get ATSC capture with none of the frills, and of course no QAM. Biggest issue is whether you have a free PCI slot.

The HVR-1600 is a little more expensive than the A180, but you get a lot more in the package. This card is dual tuner, one HD and one SD. The SD will record from coaxial or S-video, but not composite, at least no without an adaptor. It also has an IR receiver and an IR blaster. So, if you are looking for a single card solution for multiple inputs, and need to control a satellite or cable box, this may be the better choice. Strictly based on HD capturing performance, both cards perform equally well and are limited only by your other hardware and the quality of your incoming antenna signal.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 6:55 pm by Rakesh and is filed under SnapStream Store. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.