Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good Piece of Gadget - Watch Freeview on your laptop, 20 April 2008
It's incredulous that this little USB dongle - scarcely bigger than a USB flash-drive - more than fulfils the function of a full-blown Terrestrial Freeview set-top 'digibox' decoder, and in excellent resolution too.
Firstly, unless you live next-door to a TV transmitter, you might as well ditch the tiny aerial supplied - for it's a waste of space - and connect to a 'proper' TV aerial (preferably of wide-band log-periodic design, ideally with integral RF amplifier). Then the results are stunning. In my case, used on a 1.7GHz P-Mobile (Centrino) laptop (with unusually high resolution screen) both picture and sound quality is awesome. I use high quality headphones to realise the stunning sound, as laptop speakers are never very 'Hi-Fi'. You might want to tone-down the dazzlingly bright blue activity led too, for it's a tad overpowering! I used a stationery hole-punch to cut a small disk from the fogged end of a strip of 35mm colour negatives and glued it over the led. It is now suitably muted but perfectly visible. I mount the DVB-T USB Adapter on the top edge of the laptop lid (just above the screen) with Velcro, so that it faces the viewer, thereby ensuring that the supplied remote-control works reliably, for its pick-up sensor now points towards the remote.
It's surprising to discover that the dongle runs quite hot - but within its design parameters, I would think; showing that its processor is working quite hard. It also works the host computer's processor fairly hard too, but everything keeps up OK. Powered from a USB port - which on a laptop would provide no more than about 2.5W of 5V power - the system copes perfectly. I would think the decoder is probably drawing close on 2.5W - enough to make it feel mighty warm to the touch. It cools very quickly on power-down though, showing that its passive cooling is dissipating the heat well. But all processors tend to run hot - hence the need for active cooling on system CPUs and GPUs.
The bundled software - Blaze DTV - is both comprehensive and intuitive. It delivers superb picture and sound quality, interpreting 16:9 (wide-screen) versus 4:3 aspect ratios intelligently. It just gets it right every time. It also allows the computer to become a PVR (personal video recorder) complete with time-shift facility (i.e. instant pause and resumed/delayed viewing of the program) and has an alternative interface for playing DVDs (from an existing DVD drive) together with user-controls for colour, audio EQ, screen aspect, etc. And it provides the user-interface for the VB-T USB Adapter to scan for receivable channels.
Regrettably, selected channels cannot be added to the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) - the on-screen list of available channels - because a re-scan overwrites the channel list. However, as revealed in the User Guide - thoughtfully provided on the mini-CD in both html and PDF (i.e. Adobe Acrobat) formats - by deleting one of its system files, a re-scan can be forced. Therefore, if that system file, containing a list of channels, viewable with a text editor, is saved under an arbitrary name (e.g. the name of the target transmitter used when its scan was performed) it can be reinstated, restoring all the channels found during that particular scan.
You may be wondering why I deem all this multi-transmitter stuff significant - well, it's because I am using the system in a Motor home, which by its very nature finds itself in various locations, with the need to scan for channels from different TV transmitters.
All in all, the laptop computer and VB-T USB Adapter together with its Blaze DTV software provide a cost-effective, high quality solution to delivering stunning TV and digital radio reception, plus DVD playback on a computer. you really can't go wrong at this price.
I have now bought another as a spare, for if this one ever packs up (and it conceivably could, given the temperature at which it operates) I would be heartbroken.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Great concept - pity it doesn't work, 11 May 2008
The concept is fantastic. Plug in a small usb dongle and receive Freeview channels on your PC or Laptop.
If my personal experience is anything to go by then you need, literally, to be within a stone's throw of the Freeview Transmitting Mast.
Little (nothing) is said about just how poor the supplied aerial actually is. It's dreadful.
Although my home location is 'line of sight' to the Freeview Aerial Mast I could not receive a single station using the usb plug in unit with the supplied aerial. In all fairness, my 'line of sight' although uninterrupted, is about 20 miles distant from the actual transmitter mast.
"Fair enough" I thought, "let's try connecting it to the external aerial that feeds the signal to our lounge and kitchen".
Well, that didn't work either. Although the software associated with the unit indicated that the system was scanning through all the channels (a long slow process) absolutely nothing was detected - nada, zilch, zero.
In a last ditch effort to test the unit supplied, I took it, the supplied aerial and software to my son's home - which is only 9 miles away from the transmitting aerial.
Alas, even though we loaded the software onto a different computer and waited while the software plodded through all the frequencies/channels, the end result was exactly as before - nothing. No signals at all!
Maybe I got a 'duff' device, I don't know - but unlike the other reviewer who appears to have obtained great results, no matter what type / size of external Freeview Aerial we connected to the device, nothing at all was reveived. Not even a glimmer of a signal.
The TV aerial I have at home and that at my son's home (and which we plugged into the usb device) are "Freeview Specific" aerials and provide thumpingly strong signals to our Freeview enabled TV's (One Samsung the other LG).
As always in such cases, Amazon excelled themselves in dealing with the return arrangements and subsequent refund.
Since returning the device, I spent some time researching the viability of these devices and it seems that there are substantial differences between different manufacturers products, especially in regard to the sensitivity of the devices in receiving Freeview signals.
I suggest that you do your homework using the Internet as there are loads of good and bad comments about the various makes. Amazon sell some of the models regarded by end users as being "the best" - but regrettably these do not include the model featured on this page. (Yes, I know! I should have done my homework first before buying, but I guess I'm lazy and just assumed that the device would work OK).
Oh yes! One last point. The weight of the complete package as received through the mail is 143grammes - not 2Kg as stated above.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Watching Freeview in our office this very minute, 13 May 2008
The item arrived in this morning's post from Duronic. I had previously downloaded the latest version of BlazeVideo HDTV Player 2.5 and finally after a bit of a struggle realised that I had to set this up via the "Folders" icon to set the HDTV to open by default on the AF9005 tuner/filter.Having done that the software automatically opens up the DVB-TV dongle and the blue LED comes on.The drivers I had downloaded & installed from the mini-CD.
How does one get the remote control to operate?
BTW - the small antenna does not work in my location but on the main aerial all DTT (TV & Radio) channels were downloaded from Winter Hill TX but the dongle does not support MHEG 5 for digital text.Nor does it allow analogue TV and teletext to be received as far as I can ascertain.
However the BlazeVideo software allows you to operate the dongle very well - you can form a "favourites" list of channels.But the channel scan does not give you the LCNs you would see on a Freeview box - the numbering is as the channels are downloaded.
Also the dongle runs very hot and I used a male to female USB adapter cable to connect it to my laptop....better than directly plugging in with quite some heat transfer a possibility and less strain on a laptop USB port when a heavy TV coax cable is attached to the dongle.
However, all in all, a good value especially for a sales rep staying in hotels with TV distribution but room TVs that are analogue only & not DTT.Freeview for TV and Radio on your laptop is a good ruse.
Forget the antenna - and the unit needs a male/female USB adapter cable to safeguard your laptop/PC from the heat generated by the dongle.
I was not disappointed for the money paid.
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