Kworld X-Pert TV-PVR USB 2.0 TV Tuner

Rating:
Summary: x-pert pver
Review: ****updated*****
I'm very satisfied with this product. At first I bought the win-tv solution which proved to be a very good box. I just wasn't completely satisfied with its picture quality and so I returned it. After searching through the numerous mentions of non-reliably performing USB 2.0 options, I found this tuner which offers better picture quality with fairly reliable performance. However, the driver patch provided by k-world is critical for it's tvr app to run well with my win xp professional.

I HAVEN'T TESTED THE PVR performance of the box though so I can't say that it will reliably record your favorite tv shows (such footage requires more hard drive space than I'm currently prepared to devote to the tv tuner). Since I don't have a massive drive, I probably won't do much of that until I get some kind of external hard drive.

What I can say is that if you're just looking for something with which to get pretty good quality tv and almost cd quality sound without the fear of having your computer run very unpredictably, this device is a great option.

That said, I'll mention some cons:
-it can't stream audio over the USB; if your sound card doesn't provide a line in slot, for instance my laptop doesn't, you'll have to buy an additional USB box that will give you that input. I got mine from circuit city for an additional $40 but I use it for 5.1 channel DVD audio also (can't get 5.1 from tv tuner!). The plus though is that I can get good stereo sound.

-On two occasions the driver has hard frozen on me. I believe it had to do with having the tuner run in the background of a bunch of other programs. The device has not frozen on me since I started leaving the tuner dialog box on top of any other programs I have running in the background and I've had the device for over seven months now. A setting for this can be found in the video menu of the driver's setup utility.

-the number of cables I end up connecting makes this box more cumbersome than the wintv solution, which does stream sound (although of a lesser quality) over the usb

Pros
-great remote control
-excellent PATCHED! driver

NOTE:
My computer is a Pentium M 1.4 Ghz with 512MB of RAM....The system requirements of this device as listed on it's box are pretty demanding:
Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz or above
256 MB RAM

If you do buy the box, play with the setup video settings...
I find that a brightness setting of 84, contrast of 39, hue of 58, and saturation of 63 looks pretty good on my LCD display.