Review: Gigabyte GC-PTV-TAF Hybrid TV tuner

Provides your PC with analogue or digital TV, but only one channel at a time

If you’re building a home theatre PC, you’ll need some form of TV tuner card.

Based on the the Philips 8275A tuner and SAA7131E de-coder chips, Gigabyte's new GC-PTV-TAF is a dual format analogue/digital TV tuner on a PCI card.

In addition to TV, it also includes an FM radio tuner. All international broadcast standards, NTSC, PAL and SECAM are supported.

Included with the card are a T-style flexible wire FM aerial, a hi-gain 34cm stiff wire TV aerial, a 3mm stereo jack to two RCA phono socket splitter lead for audio inputs, a USB IR sensor and a full-size remote.

Two standard coax sockets for the TV and FM aerial inputs, an S-video connector for video input an RCA phono socket for composite video in and a stereo 3mm jack socket for audio input, are all mounted on the back plate of the card.

Unlike the Terratec Cinergy 2400i DT , this Gigabyte model only houses a single tuner, so if you want to record two channels at the same time, you'll need to purchase two cards.

Gigabyte ships this card with Cyberlink Power Cinema 4.0  - a popular third party software choice for control of TV tuner hardware that’s relatively easy to use.

A rolling menu on the home page has choices for TV, Movies, Videos, Music, Pictures, Radio, Extras and Settings which link to sub-menus on further pages.

Fully integrated with Power Cinema, the full-size 42-button remote allows full control from the comfort of the living room couch.

Although the Gigabyte GC-PTV-TAF lacks DAB radio, given the availability of DVB-T radio channels this may not be missed.

As a multi-format tuner add-on the Gigabyte Digital Theatre Hybrid TV card is full featured and keenly priced. Its small size (12 x 6.8cm) also means it will easily fit in a low profile case.