PixelView PlayTV@7000

Introduction

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In a market full of competitive products a company needs to do everything to differentiate their product. Prolink has done just that with its PixelView PlayTV@7000. Not only is it a fully featured PVR-solution with FM-radio, it also has a pretty unique feature which allows you to control it through e-mail.

Features&Specifications 

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The PixelView PlayTV@7000 is a well featured TV-tuner card:

• TV/FM/Video/Audio Input
• FM Radio
• Time-Shifting (Pause TV)
• MPEG2/DVD recording
• Schedule Recording
• Video On Desktop
• Teletext 
• Remote Control
• One touch eDrive Remote

The specifications for the card are:

TV Tuner
• 181 channel support
• Stereo sound
• 75ohm F/IEC Type connector TV-RF Input
• 75ohm F/IEC Type connector FM-RF Input

Video
• Composite Video
• S-Video In

The card has connectors for TV/FM as well as S-Video In and Line-In

Audio
• Line-In

MPEG Compression
• Video Bit rate: MPEG2 Full D1: 2 - 15Mbps(VBR,CBR)
• Audio Bit rate: 224Kbps
• Sampling Rate: 44.1KHz, 48KHz

Frame size
• 720 x 576 (PAL) / 720 x 480 (NTSC)

Board size
• 167.0 mm x 64.7mm

The bundle

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The bundle contains all that you need for a TV-tuner:

• The card
• All sorts of cables
• CD with drivers and applications
• CD with WinDVD 5 (2 speaker version)
• Remote

The applications you get are:

• PV Center TV – used to view and record TV.
• PV Center Radion – used to listen and record from Radio
• PV Center Remote – lets you set up the remote for use in other applications

Installation

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Installing the PixelView PlayTV@7000 is a breeze. Install drivers. Install card. Voila – everything works!

Next it is time to set everything up. Prolink has made this easy by providing wizards for each application.

Scanning for TV-channels can be done in different ways. Since I had no clue what “DX9 tuning channels” was I fired away a question to Prolink about it. This was their response:

“For your question, it's caused by different frequency table in the world.
Sometimes, the TV frequency table is not the same in same country but in different town.
With our PV Center, we want to fix this problem by different frequency scan.
 
There are three kinds of frequency scan.
1. By standard TV frequency table => maintain by Prolink
2. By DirectShow's TV frequency table of Microsoft => made by Microsoft (however, it will have some problems in some countries)
3. By FreeScan => it can scan all exist channel by frequency but it's much slower than above two ways and take much times.
 
So, users can choose three ways to scan TV frequency and never miss any channels.”

I had no issues scanning the channels using the default setting (using the frequency table from Prolink) and it even picked up the names of some of the channels. After the scan is finished you can give names to each channel (in case it didn’t pick the name up while scanning) and of course it lets you reorder all channels.

The tuner can even pick up names of some of the larger channels direct when scanning for them.

Setting up the radio works in a similar way although it stops after each station it finds and lets you decide to keep or discard it.