Review of Formac TVR Studio
Hello,
Well, finally opened it all up and plugged in etc tonight. My first impressions about the thing is its size (it's about half the size of my PB15") and how many damned connections there are! There's loads - FW i/o, Composite Video i/o, S-Video i/o, L-R Audio i/o. Power i/o (output for the camera), coaxial cable/terrestrial in and a power switch. Although that doesn't really count...
Sorry, I digress.
Right, plugged it in, Ran the installers off the CD, found out that one of them wasn't necessary as it's for driving the Formac external DVD burner (sadly not included as a freebie - misers), and started up the Studio TVR application....
I was asked where I resided (it had UK listed under Pal-I and I always thought we were PAL-B, so I learnt something or was misinformed), and guided through setting up all the channels...which didn't achieve much as it wasn't connected to anything at the time. Never mind.
Oh at this point I should mention that I couldn't help plugging everything in at once, so the two LaCie D2s and the Formac were all plugged into my PB.
Here's a photo of this joyous configuration...
The problem was as I expected in a different post on this forum - the TVR wouldn't boot up at all if the D2s were plugged in, albeit they were plugged into FW800 and the TVR was plugged into FW400. (I thought 400 and 800 would run off different busses, so if anyone can enlighten me I'd be very appreciative.) Once the D2s were unplugged, the device booted up fine and all gathered round proceeded to be merry.
😀
Sorry for the rambling - I get a bit carried away & only realise when people remark on how 'thorough' I am...
Anyway, connected the coaxial output of our Sky box to the TVR (our Sky only has SCART out and I don't have my leads on me at the moment, so Coax had to do for test purposes). There didn't appear to be a simple way to tune in just one channel on the TVR, so I just ran an autotune on the whole lot and it proceeded to tune in about 100 channels for me, only 5 of which had a signal (4 terrestrial and one from Sky). At this point I should mention that the interface does look very aesthetically appley with it's platinum-style windows, although the icons in the preferences panel are very grainy and, well, grey, but they do offer quite a few tweakages.
Here's a pic of the screen layout
There were several problems with window resizing as well, where I'd choose 'half size' and the window would do a genie-esque rendition of disappearing into the middle of the desktop and desist from appearing in any shape or form. At which point I had to quit the application by using the old apple-tab/q. Strange.
The quality of the picture was a little grainy, but this is to be expected when using a coaxial output rather than S-vid or Composite. There was also a DV-size mode and a TV-modus mode which gave a full-screen picture, with a quite neat controller down the left side.
TV pausing and recording worked fine, with an option for DV or Quicktime format recordings, although quite how you'd use the TVR with a laptop and record to external hard-drive is beyond me. I'm planning on buying an external power supply for the TVR to see if this rectifies the problem...
Erm...other things about the TVR...a nice feature is that when a film/tv is playing, you can 'drag', apple-style, a screen still to wherever you like. Nice way of screen-capturing DVDs (albeit played through S-Video or Composite, which rather defeats the object of owning a PB with a DVD player).
One fuss is that if the PB had been on my lap while I'd been doing this, I think my legs would have been carbonised as a temperature not entirely dissimilar to that of the sun's surface appeared to radiate forth from my PB's aluminum bodywork - this is possibly due to the Power demands of the little TVR unit. We'll see.
Oh - as you may have seen in the earlier pic, the windows pop out the side of the main window a-la Mail Mailboxes tray etc. Nice feature as they all cling on that way. Also, one of the trays contains all your recorded films which you can choose to export in whatever format you choose:
here's a shot of just that
Think I should stop writing now. I keep trying to put in bits in a vain bid to feel like I've reviewed the thing properly, but I can sense that this is mainly a stream of consciousness. So I'm going to go now, and people can ask questions if they want more information. Sorry!
Oh - would I recommend it? Well, my dad's happy with it cos of all the different connections on the thing. And I'm happy cos I can watch/record tv whilst chargrilling my thighs...but I can't help but think the Elgato, rather ironically, looks more Elegant and looking at the prices again, may even be at a better price point. Yes, at the sacrifice of less connections, but the TVR software was last updated in May 2003, which was a bit disturbing.
Ask away if you wish - I'll answer anything/post more shots if required. I'll even run tests on it if you like.
Db
PS If you've read this whole thing, you're a better man (or woman, although that's a moot point) than I, as I couldn't even be bothered to read back over all of it to spell/sense check...
