HTPC - TV Tuner Reviews

More DVICO Fusion5 Gold

Most of you are probably after a single piece of information: how does the Fusion5 fare in actual use? For the most part, the Fusion5 works as expected. Channel setup/acclimation is painful, but once you've found your favorite stations and/or become used to the new channel locations, everything works quite well. We had a ton of comments about difficulties with using the FusionHDTV software when we were using version 3.11, but we're glad that we can forget about most of the serious problems and simply recommend users upgrade to the latest 3.19.05 release (or perhaps even a newer version). However, there are still a few issues that remain that make this a less-than-perfect card.

The biggest issue is the user interface. Simply put, it is clunky. After scanning channels, deleting channels can only be done one at a time. It would be much more convenient to allow the user to select multiple channels using shift+click and/or ctrl+click functionality and delete groups of unwanted channels at once. (MyHD's software allows this and it is a much better solution.) Even with all of the channels properly configured, changing channels doesn't always work properly. This seems to be related to skipping encrypted channels, and certain stations seem to cause problems. If you use the "favorites" mode, most of the difficulties disappear. Besides, you don't really want to press "channel up/down" 20 times as you surf through shopping channels, do you?

One of the oddities with channels is changing between digital and analog modes. Channel 830-1 (83, subchannel 1) is the local HD broadcast of NBC, according to FusionHDTV. (It probably varies by cable provider and location, but that's not important.) While pressing "830" tunes into the channel when you're already watching another digital station, it doesn't work if you're in analog mode. Pressing the "Live" button on the remote switches between the various modes: analog, digital, or S-VIDEO. (If that doesn't make much sense to you, I'm in complete agreement. Let's just pretend "Live" is another word for "Input" or "Mode".) So, if you're watching an analog channel, you have to first press the Live button, wait for the card to tune to whatever digital station that you were on last, and then press 830. This is all basically unnecessary, since the actual channels are usually discrete (i.e. channel 83 will in most cases have either analog or digital content, but not both). It would be better to forget about switching between analog and digital modes manually - or at least make that an advanced option for those who want it.

Click to enlarge.

In previous versions of FusionHDTV, there was a relatively common occurrence of losing your channels. It happened at least twice during testing, but several days with the updated software has not managed to reproduce the error. (It is one of the major bugs that was supposed to be fixed with this update, so we're happy that they have apparently squashed this bug.) In 3.11, several error messages came up (shown above) and the software crashed. At that point, the only way to get FusionHDTV back up and running was to delete your channel list and rescan. The channel list is stored in the registry, under HKEY_Current_User\Software\DVICO. You might want to back that tree up, just in case, once you've configured all the channels the way you like. If you ever want to reinitialize FusionHDTV without reinstalling, deleting that tree from the registry also seems to do the trick.

Perhaps a more annoying problem is that there's no way to get TitanTV to tune in to digital cable channels automatically, so you'll have to schedule recordings for DTV channels manually. The onscreen Guide also doesn't work for me - it shows up blank - but this appears to be at least partly Comcast's fault. The FusionHDTV software is supposed to read the EPG information from the channel stream, but Comcast isn't including that in my area, as far as I can tell. (This was a problem on the MyHD as well, so that lends credence to the assumption that the local Comcast provider is to blame.)

One other issue is that we could not get the uninstall program to work in the normal manner. Using the Add/Remove Programs tool in the control panel, selecting DVICO FusionHDTV and then pressing the "Remove" button causes CPU usage to climb to 100%; memory usage climbs up well over 1GB, but the software remains installed. The solution is to relaunch the setup application and select uninstall from there. This may have been remedied in the latest release as well, but I haven't had a reason to uninstall the latest FusionHDTV build.

Despite the above issues, all is not lost. Analog TV reception was good, though not great. Viewing and recording analog channels worked without any hassle, and even in the older software version, we never encountered problems with the analog support. There is a quirk with analog recordings in that the FusionHDTV interface for playing files doesn't show anything but .TP files if you're in the fullscreen mode, and there's no way to open MPEG or AVI files without using a mouse. Remember how we said that the remote was pretty ugly anyway? You might seriously consider saving money by getting the "Lite" version of the card and investing in a quality wireless mouse. Another problem with our analog recordings is that they have a high-pitched noise. It seems to be an artifact of the encoding/recording process, and it really needs to be fixed. Anyway, the analog mode certainly isn't going to win over people looking for the best noise reduction, comb filtering, etc., but it will suffice for most people who want HD/QAM support first and decent analog support second.

The Fusion5 card is Windows MCE compliant, but only the analog and OTA DTV reception work with the Windows MCE interface. Given the issues with the FusionHDTV software, MCE seems like a great idea. The loss of QAM channels in MCE would be a problem, but you can still run the FusionHDTV software on MCE for occasions where QAM decoding is desired. Of course, you cannot run both the MCE application and FusionHDTV concurrently, as only one application has access to overlay mode at a time. If a large portion of your TV viewing is still analog channels, though, this card provides an interesting alternative to buying both an OTA HDTV tuner and a separate analog card. Or you could get a better quality analog card and simply use this card as a standard HDTV receiver, with or without the QAM support.

Another plus, relative to its main competitor, is the overlay mode. If you've ever wanted to do away with overscan on televisions (which occurs on both analog and digital TVs), piping the content through the graphics card will work. The video window can be scaled smoothly from whatever size you want up to the maximum resolution, and double-clicking the window or pressing the "Fullscreen" button on the remote serves as a quick shortcut. It seems like a small thing, but when you try some software that lacks this feature, you'll really miss it. The HD output in fullscreen mode looked pretty close to the quality of the output from the Comcast box, and with a bit of adjustment to the TV, it would be difficult to see the difference.

In the end, this card is something of an ugly duckling. (One has to wonder what Fusion 1 through 4 were like.) It started out with stability issues, periodic crashes, and lost channel lineups. Initially, I really wouldn't be able to recommend the card (unless the idea of paying to be a beta tester sounds like fun). However, the latest software release has turned this card into... well, certainly not a beautiful swan, but it's also no longer an ugly duckling. The UI is still less than stellar, but you can learn to live with it. There are positive and negative aspects, but it ends up being like an ornery old pet that you can't help but like. Image quality on the digital channels is as good as any other card that we've seen, and analog reception is acceptable as well. Configuring the recording options is slightly easier than on the MyHD, and at least that portion of the Fusion interface is superior from a usability standpoint. It's not perfect, by any means, but it might just be "good enough" if you're in the market for an all-in-one TV tuner.