3dfx VoodooTV FM

• Price: £99.99

Video may have killed the radio star back in the early 1980s, but hard disk-based recorders such asthe new TiVo may signal the death knell for VCRs themselves. After all, why have a machine withmoving parts when a solid-state system should work much better? There’ll also be no tapes wearingout and getting caught inside. You could base the same ideal by using your PC and spending just aquarter of the price of the dedicated unit on the Voodoo TVFM card.

Once installed, the back of the card contains connections for inputs from a TV aerial, FM radio aerial,composite video, s-video from devices such as a camcorder and a cable-ready 125-channel TV tuner.With the s-video input you can record mini-movies onto your hard drive in MPEG1, for the samequality as Video CD, or an uncompressed AVI file. If your want is simply to time-shift simple TVprogrammes, the digital VCR facility can be used to program in as many recordings as you like, withvariable quality settings.

There are downsides though. Firstly, there’s no slider when playing back a recording, so you can’t gostraight to a specific part without a lot of fast-forwarding if you happen to stop part-way through. Youcan play back the MPEG1 files on Windows Media Player, which has a slider but has more of atendancy for the picture to go out of sync with the sound if you’re using your PC for other things atthe same time and especially in DOS, whereas the “play” function on the digital VCR doesn’t getaffected so badly.

Another problem, which seems quite a staggering omission to me, is the lack of an s-video outputconnection, as you’d find on a DVD-ROM player for example. In fact there’s only inputs to be foundon the card, bar an audio-out which will be inside the PC allowing you to daisy-chain the audio fromyour CD-ROM drive via the Voodoo TVFM to your soundcard. I can watch programmes on the TVvia my Voodoo 3 3000 AGP card – but it’s not as good as a dedicated output from the TV tuner cardwould be – and this sort of output I’d only use for games where pixel-perfect definition isn’t as higha requirement as DVD.

Radio fans will be pleased with the inclusion of an FM radio once an aerial is connected. Scan up anddown the dial for your favourite stations, confirm the presets then sit back and enjoy. Also built in isan MP3 encoder. The way it should work is by registering the product with their website,3dfxgamers.com, but the program to complete the process is not available online for download. Eitherthat or parts of their site just aren’t working as they should.

Two other additions I must mention are the Skin Paks, a selection of onscreen remote control layoutsto suit many different tastes. I still found myself using the original one though. The teletext facility isa most welcome on. All the pages come up instantly once it’s taken a few seconds to load them all in.You can also cycle through the sub-pages just as easily. This feature is fantastic and I’d rather use thisone than that on my TV.

Finally, I must finish this review stating the problem I had getting the card to work properly. WhenI used the drivers supplied, it refused to do anything else than presume I had an NTSC signal and theU.K. wasn’t a viable country option to select. Trying the new drivers online failed, although then goingback to the old ones did resolve this. The fun was short-lived and continues to be so when the programjust crashes for no reason whatsoever – either at random times while in use or when it’s not in use andyou press ‘tv’ on the supplied remote – and your PC is instantly rebooted! I then found that Windowsthought it was not installed and tried to reinstall the NEW drivers, thus rendering the program uselessuntil I went and changed them back. I hope that was easy to follow as it was quite a mind-bender forme!

In short, when it works, it’s very useful. When it resets your machine with no prior warning, it’s thebane of your life and as such this marks the product down considerably.

Overall: 2/5

This review was on Freeloader.com before they closed.