DVB-T USB 2.0 Freeview TV Stick - £19.99! (merged)

pivotalgubbins

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/home/

Quickfind code: 108219

I can't get Freeview here and haven't got access to an external aerial from my PC, so giving it a miss. I hope it helps someone though, certainly looks like a bargain.

bartman

Does anybody know whether these Freeview USB sticks are as good as or better than a PCI card for a desktop? I see that Ebuyer have a couple of others around the £25 mark, I find it confusing trying to compare the specs!

amoeba

The stick is good, but the remote control is poor and the aerial is utterly useless unless you live next door to a transmitter.

For £20, its a bit of a bargain.

R00STER00

This looks great for the price, but does anyone know the system req for it as the website is extremely vague on that?

TimC

bartman wrote:

Does anybody know whether these Freeview USB sticks are as good as or better than a PCI card for a desktop? I see that Ebuyer have a couple of others around the £25 mark, I find it confusing trying to compare the specs!

I have the freecom version, to be honest it is fairly mediocre running under windows. My PC is three years old now, but is a 2.4GHz P4 with 768MB of RAM so copes with most things I throw at it, but this device seems to need 100% of resources - do anything else on the PC and the picture and sound break up, any recordings have gaps in them etc. Leave the PC alone, and you get a great recording. I picked up the £40 Dual DivX DVD player in Asda at the same time, plays the files with no conversion, so long as they are under 2GB. The other problem I have found is the software often crashes, if left on to record during the day - makes sense to reboot the PC occaisonally.

Under LINUX - it runs with no problem - and will record all channels on a single multiplex if you require (e.g. BBC1 & BBC2 simultaneously).

At some point, I plan to buy something that decrypts the signal itself (probably still USB), rather than the PC doing the work, which is the case with these devices. HTH

sco0ter

I have the freecom one and use it on my PC and laptop

desktop
Windows XP sp2
Athlon XP 2600
1GB Ram
Geforce 6600GT 128 MB

Runs brilliantly even in the background when using office and surfing. Copying also works flawlessly

Laptop
Intel Celeron 1.5ghz
512MB RAM
128 mb intel shared graphics card

Runs perfect on this as well. Can use Office and surf the web wirelessly with no break up. I dont use the freecom software though I use the Yakumo software.

yezdi

sco0ter wrote:

I dont use the freecom software though I use the Yakumo software.

Where do I get the Yakumo software ? Is it free on the web ?

blinky

Yakumo also sell the same stick under their name (as do some others). However, Yakumo supply Microsoft BDA drivers which means you can use the stick with any software which supports the BDA standard e.g. XP MCE, ProgDVB (free), WebScheduler (free), ShowShifter etc.

You can download the Yakumo drivers from their website.

dv1_2

blinky wrote:

Yakumo also sell the same stick under their name (as do some others). However, Yakumo supply Microsoft BDA drivers which means you can use the stick with any software which supports the BDA standard e.g. XP MCE, ProgDVB (free), WebScheduler (free), ShowShifter etc.

You can download the Yakumo drivers from their website.

do these Yakumo drivers work for the stick offered in the thread, or just the freecom usb ?

blinky

The comments say that the device is MCE compatible. Therefore there must be BDA drivers for this device.

seth

TimC wrote:

Under LINUX - it runs with no problem - and will record all channels on a single multiplex if you require (e.g. BBC1 & BBC2 simultaneously).

At some point, I plan to buy something that decrypts the signal itself (probably still USB), rather than the PC doing the work, which is the case with these devices. HTH

Thanks for the info which version of Windows do you use (and SP level please) also do you know which USB chipset your PC has? Mine are all VIA.

Which Linux distro are you using? Again version, type (enterprise etc) and kernel, plus patches / mods you had to make, please.

AFAIK the freeview stuff is just a mpeg2 stream so no decoding required, just stream to player, disk etc.

By decode did you mean demux? I'm a bit new to the freeview world, ditched Sky and I have a Humax 9200T so I'm keen to learn about this.