X-bit labs

Six PCI TV-Tuners Roundup (page 13)

Category: Multimedia

by Sergey Samarin

[ 02/16/2004 | 11:05 PM ]

Genius’ own software is made in a very awkward way. When I installed the drivers the refresh rate for some reason dropped to 60Hz. The tuner management utility is not simple and convenient enough, which is a definite drawback against the background of the competing solutions available in the market.

The settings are so few that they all fitted into a single page:

I have quite a few products from Genius in my system. I work with a Genius optical mouse and Genius GM56PCI-L modem based on a Lucent chip. However, I never used Genius’ software for the latter, as the own software from Lucent is of much better quality. I am saying this to stress once again that it makes sense to get some third-party software for your genius TV-tuner once you get it. In fact, almost all genius products users have arrived at this conclusion, which you may often come across in various forums. Nevertheless, this TV-tuner solution is a pretty popular device.

Having checked out the scarce settings offered by the brand name software bundle, I decided to go for some other utilities and tools. Since Video Wonder Pro III card carefully follows the reference design (actually, it is as like as peas with FlyTV Prime 34 and FleVideo 3000 cards), it should work fine with the reference drivers, too. This is exactly what I did. Note that the image quality got significantly better after I installed these drivers. I will not show you the frames captured with Genius’ home software, but will go straight to the better ones saved with the reference drivers: