Full Review of the Vbox DTA-164e

Full Review of the Vbox DTA-164e

Well, after a 7 month wait (from the original release announcement), the DTA-164e is finally here. It was to be the first ATSC/digital PCI-e x1 tuner on market, however due to the delay, the Fusion HDTV5 Express beat it by a few weeks. But it is the first dual ATSC tuner on the market. The DTA-164e is actually a dual hybrid tuner (analog/digital) with software encoding for analog. There is no QAM (digital cable) capability.

Here's what you get in the box:

Cat's Eye 164e HDTV Tuner Card w/PCI Bracket

Low profile PCI Bracket

Installation CD includes drivers, MPEG Encoding software (demo version) and Installation Guide

Quick Installation Guide

The install is straight forward. Install the card, boot, install the drivers from the CD as directed by the XP installation wizard. Definitely download and install the latest drivers from Vbox here.

DTA-164e Highlights

Works as any combination (2 analog, 2 digital, 1 analog/1 digital) in Media Center. See Media Center 2005 (below) or Vista RTM page (soon) for install details.

Works with SageTV and BeyondTV.

Is not as good at tuning weak/multipath signals as the Vbox DTA-150 and some 5th generation tuners, but better than the new ATI Wonder 650 and many others.

Analog video quality is very good, not great, but better than some other software encoder tuners.

Digital/ATSC tuning is inconsistent with included drivers. New drivers that fix this problem are now avaialble from Vbox.

Card runs a bit hot. Cooling a consideration for small case PCs or ones with poor air flow.

PC processor utilization acceptable, within published system requirements.

Works well with other analog and digital tuners both PCI and USB based.

The upper RF supplies signal for the 2 digital tuners, the bottom RF for the 2 analog tuners. Therefore only one RF connection is required if digital is all that you need.

Attach a over the air antenna to the top RF port and a analog cable to the bottom for simultaneous recording of an over the air digital, and a analog cable program using MCE.

Attach two over the air antenna RF inputs and use the tuner to view/record any combination of 2 analog, or 2 digital, or 1 analog and 1 digital program at the same time, and change the combination at any time using MCE.

FM tuner works with Media Center 2005, Vista Media Center and BeyondTV 4. Center RF is for FM, but an antenna attached to any RF will work.

Test Setup

Two PC�s will be used to test:

System 1: 3.0 Pentium 4 w/HT (turned off), 1 GB memory, dual 160 GB SATA drives, Powercolor PCI-e X800GTO w/128MB GDDR memory graphics card

System 2: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (not overclocked), 512MB memory, dual 120 GB ATA drives, EVGA PCI-e GeForce 7600 GS w/256 DDR2 (test using this system coming soon)

System 1 will be used under the following OS's:

XP Home (review coming soon)
XP Media Center 2005 (all current updates including Rollup 2)
Vista RTM Home Premium (review coming soon)

System 2 will be used under XP Media Center 2005 only.

Signal Input: The RF signal comes from a 30 year old roof top directional antenna of unknown origin, no amplification, with a Signal Vision 3-way splitter (only two ports used the third has very degraded signal). The main antenna farm is 40 miles away. The setup receives 17 major ATSC (digital) channels (1 VHF, 16 UHF), with 31 subchannels, and approximately 19 watchable NTSC (analog) channels (depending on how much snow is considered watchable). There are minor multipath issues, mainly large oak trees.

There is one "magical" ATSC UHF channel (not in the same orientation as the farm) that can be received by some tuners and not others (unless there are poor atmospheric conditions). For example the Vbox DTA-150 (along with several 5th gen USB tuners) can pull in this station, but the ATI Wonder 650, ATI HDTV Wonder, Avermedia A180 and the Fusion HDTV3 PCI cards cannot. So this is THE test station for digital reception senitivity as both multipath and weak signal are a factor.

Test Plan:

The DTA-164e will be tested with the following 3rd party applications:

Media Center 2005 (System 1 & 2)
Vista RTM Media Center (System 1 only)
BeyondTV4 & SageTV under XP Home (System 1 only)

Tests will include the following for each 3rd party application:

Processor usage with both tuners active (analog & digital), one displayed on monitor, the other recording.
Analog quality vs. ATI 650 Wonder (hardware encoder)
The tuners configured as: Both analog, both digital, or one each
Tuning multipath and weak stations (both analog and digital)

Media Center 2005 Test

Decoders used: Nvidia Purevideo
Encoders used: Kram MCEE (go here for more details)

Processor usage with both tuners recording and one being displayed

System 1:

Both analog: 60-80%
Both digital: 40-50%
One each: 60-75%

System 2:

Both analog: 70-85%
Both digital: 45-55%
One each: 65-80%

Analog quality:

164e (strong signal)
ATI 650 (strong signal)

164e (weak signal)
ATI 650 (weak signal)

Configuration:

Both Analog: Works using Kram Drivers
Both Digital: Works if analog card already installed or w/Kram Drivers
One each: Works using Kram Drivers
Both tuners Digital and Analog: Works using Kram Drivers

Tuning

analog � stations received - all 19
digital � stations received - all but "magic" channel (see signal input section above). That channel displays intermittent frozen screens and some audio.

Comments:

Decoders are required to get the card to work properly in MCE. Go here for more information on decoders.

Additonally, to get analog working with the 164e in MCE, just follow the install routine here.

To get the digital tuners to work without an analog card, run step #1 here.

If you use the tuners for both analog and digital, you may want to change tuner priorities. Go here for a free program to modify Media Center 2005 tuner priority settings.

Vista 164e Review , includes install routine to enable both analog and digital tuning.