BIOS: Technology Means Business

Want to watch free-to-air digital satellite on your PC? Hell yeah! AVerMedia Technologies has today announced the launch of the new DVB-S Pro PCI card. The new card allows you to access free-to-air worldwide digital satellite programmes as well as listen to radio on your PC.

No aerial cables and no antenna are required. DVB-S provides access to a much wider range of TV channels beyond geographic boundaries, including worldwide news channels for up to date global news.

DVB-S is an acronym for Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite, and means basically that the digital TV broadcasting method is done via satellite. Other digital TV broadcasting technologies developed by the DVB Project are DVB-T and DVB-C.

DVB-S is the most widely used TV standard in the world and is becoming increasingly popular in the UK following the recent announcement by ITV and the BBC of a joint venture to launch a new, user friendly, subscription-free satellite service, aptly named FreeSat.

With the aim to complement the already popular Freeview platform, FreeSat is intended to give homes across the country, that are unable to receive digital terrestrial TV, access to a wider range of quality channels for free during the imminent switchover from analogue to digital and beyond.

The new FreeSat service will include its own Electronic Programme Guide and will initially carry all ITV and BBC free-to-view digital services including digital television, digital radio, interactive services, as well as dozens of other free channels from launch in the first half of 2006.

Featuring AVerMedia’s AVerTV 6 interface, specifically designed to enrich but simplify the features of digital entertainment, the new DVB-S Pro lets you record and save TV programmes directly to your PC in MPEG-2 format as well as pause, rewind and replay live broadcasts.

You can also capture high quality still images and utilise the cards album functions to create collections of your images and recorded programmes. Unlike Sky, with the DVB-S Pro you can also copy recorded TV Programmes/images to CD/DVD to instantly create a backup of all their favourites. Record and record again without worrying about deleting old recordings!

The AVerMedia DVB-S Pro card adopts a high quality DVB-S TV tuner and video decoder to significantly improve signal reception quality for a sharper and more stable picture and the Video Quality Enhancement feature eliminates noise and jitter from recordings while colour, brightness and contrast adjustments help improve overall picture quality.

It features PIP/POP functions and a 16 channel preview as well fast channel switching and scanning. You can access all of the features of AVerTV 6 with ease using the supplied, fully featured infrared remote control. The DVB-S is fully compatible with Microsoft MCE.

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