OnAir GT Review – A USB HDTV Tuner and DVR

Using the Software

Installing the driver and software for the OnAir USB HDTV GT is very straight forward and went without a hitch on our Windows XP SP1 test system. 

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Here is the basic layout for the TV software in action.  A quick note: since taking screen shots of the video won’t work because of overlay issues, all of the screen shots that show video on the screen were simulated by me; just copy/pasting the image in there.  I thought it would help to see software with actual pictures on them!

The four windows open on the screen can be opened and closed independently and include the channel selection window, a channel scanning window (which you would only run once) as well as the video screen and the control panel with function buttons. 

There are a lot of options that can be adjusted in the software; some of which aren’t setup by default I found.  For example, here in the time shifting tab, the check box for enabling timeshifting (the ability to pause live TV) on digital TV wasn’t enabled — I had to manually enable it.  You can also adjust how much time you allow the software to timeshift depending on how much hard disk space you’re willing to give up.

One thing to note as well is that timeshifting on analog TV IS NOT POSSIBLE on this device.  Why?  The answer lies in the fact that the lower cost OnAir GT does not have its own hardware encoder and instead uses the CPU for encoding analog TV.  AutumnWave told me that the CPU requirements for timeshifting in a software encoder would be very high; too high for them to want to support the feature.   

Moving on to the video capture settings, otherwise known as recording, users have the ability to set the recording location, quality levels, resolution and output type.  The settings even do the math and estimate how much space you’ll need for each hour of recording: in this case 2.8 GB per hour.  Note that you CAN record analog TV even when you can’t timeshift with it. 

Looking at the still capture options you can select where the capture location is and file type; BMP or JPG.

In the encoder options you can enabled DirectX Video acceleration, in particular for users of NVIDIA GPUs with PureVideo support built into them.  Don’t forget what software decoder solution the OnAir GT is using.  Update (3/14/07): AutumnWave sent this comment in to us: DirectX Video Acceleration is actually a feature for ATI and Intel graphics solutions too.  In fact, the nVidia PureVideo Decoder sometimes works better for customers with ATI Radeon cards than those with nVidia cards.  You won’t need an nVidia card to take advantage of the superb performance/quality of the nVidia PureVideo Decoder. 

The audio options allow you to use various output capabilities including standard WAV output to the sound device or digital output through the SPDIF connection (if your audio card has it).  There is even support for an external AAC decoder for very high end sound setups. 

Here you can adjust the TV screen options such as modifying the on-screen display and overscan settings for users running in full screen mode. 

Here is where you can make adjustments to the remote control functionality like placing functions on the F buttons or allowing the remote to shut down the PC via the power button. 

Under the “other” section there are more options that are pretty self explanitory.  Setting the thread priority to high is definitely something I’d highly recommend.

Another setting that I searched for (and you will too!!) is how to disable the sound effect that plays every time you hit a button on the remote.  It was MUCH louder than the audio on the TV show I was watching causing me to nearly fall out of the chair when it first occurred.