The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Hauppauge Win/TV George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au Recently a company called Hauppauge released a $299 computer card that you use to display television, on your computer monitor, at full screen or in a movable, scalable window with an image as good as on the TV. Installation is very easy. Just install the card into a PCI slot in your computer, attach it to a TV antenna and run the setup disk. The hardware is detected automatically and the software will scan for all channels and automatically save the selection. Changing channels, volume, colour balance, contrast is all very easy. Short cut keys exist for switching between full screen and windowed display, adjusting volume and stations. There is no interference between the TV sound and Windows sounds. You can even have the CD playing while watching TV and alter the volumes separately. You can use other Windows applications while watching TV by having a small window in the corner while still typing in your wordprocessor. TV screens can be captured, saved and used in any graphics-capable program. As well as watching TV you can simultaneously open numerous Teletext windows (even without the TV picture) and can capture in the background the requested pages. (See Figure 1.) With Teletext, if one page continues over several sub-pages, all of these are captured and can be very quickly flipped through from memory. These pages can be saved as text, cut and pasted into your application, or set up as a DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) so that the data in your spreadsheet is automatically updated. There is also is a script language to automate data capture. You can update your PC clock with the time signal from Teletext just by clicking one button. If the TV reception on Channel 7 is good, you will have reliable Teletext data. Figure 2       Figure 1

You can also program System Agent (if you have Microsoft Plus) to have the TV automatically come on at set times of the day. (For example, to at 6:59 pm to catch the news, see Figure 2.) If you don't have System Agent, you can download an equivalent program from Hauppauge's home page.

The requirements for running the Hauppauge Win/TV card are

• Windows 95 (with a sound card if you want to listen as well as look at the TV) and a PCI slot on a computer that supports bus mastering. Most new PCI motherboards will have this support. Bus mastering enables the card to bypass the CPU and read or write directly to memory. My tests show that there is no noticeable degradation in performance when displaying TV. (However, I tend to get distracted so my productivity drops!) The CPU resource used by the TV is very low which shows that the TV card is doing all the work and the CPU is free to do other work such as re-calculate large spreadsheets without any degradation. Note the % Processor use in Figure 3.

• Have a spare interrupt available (Click on Start, Setting, Control Panel, System, Device Manager, Properties) and check that not all of the interrupts between 2 and 15 are taken. If they are, it may be possible to get the card working, but it could take some fiddling.

• You must have a video card that supports direct draw. Very many do. If you have a very low-cost video card then you may not get a clear image, especially at the full screen resolution, due to the card's inability to process all the video in time. If you get vertical banding, this may be an indication that your video card is struggling. There will be no problem with the Teletext screen image as the information changes relatively slowly.

The Australian distributor for the Hauppauge Win/TV card is A Better Computer Solution in Richmond, Victoria. This business operates from the same premises as regular PC Update advertiser, Computer Rebuilds.

Reprinted from the July 1997 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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