Compro Technology is hardly known on our market. Founded in 1989, the company  dealt mostly with OEM orders and worked with such companies as HP, Compaq and Visiontek. Their first independent solution was NVIDIA Personal Cinema developed together with the Californian IT grand and released in 2001. In 2002 Compro Technology launched a line of video cards based on NVIDIA's chips and TV tuners.

The company's biased towards innovative solutions in their products. You will see what comes out of it.

This review has an unusual story. Its first review was slashing because of a great number of problems in the Russian network. Even brand-name manufacturers sometimes simply give "objective" reasons or ignore Russian customers. The guys at Compro Technology didn't have a chance to test their products in our conditions and helped us to adapt their software. We couldn't reject such a praiseworthy initiative as well as let down our readers. That is why a month and a half later, when several software and drivers versions were changed, the engineers at Compro (Floyd, that was really pleasant to deal with you :-) ) and iXBT.com (i.e. me) come up with a bright product. So, let's start from the very beginning.

Accessory pack

The package and accessory pack are a good example of how such things should be made.

The box is a real eye catcher. Besides, the designers use hard high-quality cardboard with the words stamped out.

Inside

• Tuner
• Remote Control
• External IR sensor of the remote control
• Cable for sound card's line-in
• AUX-in cable
• Cable for mainboard power supply connector
• Adapters for aerial connectors
• FM aerial
• 4 software CDs
• Installation manual
• Software manual

Design and specification

The black PCB, gold-plated connectors and a colorful sticker on the tuner look attractive.

Functions of the connectors are written on the back (a rare thing these days).

The designers are pretty attentive to details, for example, the software and drivers are recorded on CD-Rs, each having polygraphic pictures on top.

This is what differs hi-end products from mainstream ones, and it's especially pleasant if the price remains affordable.

TV and FM signals are received by the Philips FM1236 unit.

Video and audio signals are decoded with the 9pin Philips 7134HL ADC (we know it from the EZ-TV (TVP3XP)) with the PAL/SECAM D/K support (the countries with the NTSC standard get it with the 7133HL chip).

There's actually nothing to boast of, and we turn to the distinguishing features.

First of all, the tuner supports the Compro POWER UP SCHEDULING technology. A connector from the Power button of your PC case goes to the mainboard via the tuner allowing it to control turning on/off.

Secondly, the Picture Purifying Technology supported improves reception and image quality; it includes:

• redesigned PCB
• double voltage control for higher stability and noise reduction (besides, the control is placed as far from the receiver as possible)
• proprietary software including deinterlacing, Noise Removal and Video Smoothing (software anti-aliasing in resolutions over 640x480).

The other functions are standard. Just note that it doesn't support video capture in MPEG4, though you can get it with alternative software.

Testbed configuration

• Athlon 2800XP CPU (Barton)
• Gigabyte 7VAX mainboard (KT400 chipset)
• Inno3D GeForce FX 5900 video card
• 512 MB PC3200 from Samsung
• Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 sound card
• IBM DTLA 305020 hard drive
• Windows XP Professional (SP1) ENG and Windows XP Professional (SP1) RUS

Installation

The installation  process is standard

but even in this case Compro goes its own way. The tuner has RCA connectors identical to those on home equipment

and the antennas are connected to them through adapters.

Such solution makes its installation into the PCI slot simpler but it's impossible to take out the tuner without removing the adapters, and they do not go out easily at that. Taking into account other connectors on the back that can take quite a lot of time.

Configuring

For operation under the DirectX 9.0b you should download the latest patch that corrects some mistakes in operation of the PAL/SECAM tuners. It can be downloaded from Microsoft's site for the English and Russian versions of the Windows XP.

When all the settings were made in the program menu (do not neglect the codecs of Windows Media Player 9)

we got the following devices:

The tuner uses its own software for operation.

CompoPVR for the TV mode

ComproFM for the FM receiver mode

and ComproDVD player

which actually is the PoverDVD 4.0 with additional audio features selling separately by Cyberlink. It should be noted that there's only NVIDIA among hardware makers which developed its own DVD player, that is why don't judge too strictly.

Here you can also find some programs that we saw in the review of the MSI-8918 Personal Cinema FX5200

Ulead DVD MovieFactory 2SE

and Ulead VideoStudio 7SE (updated version)

In the tray you can find icons for the ComproRemote and ComproPVR, but not for the ComproFM.

By the reasons above we use the latest driver versions for ComproPVR and ComproFM (2.3.0.9, ComproPVR 1571 and ComproFM 1290).

When the ComproPVR is started for the first time it offers for you to choose a country, TV standard, audio and video devices

then you get to the Channel tab of the Options menu which controls the frequency range and configures channels

The developers are going to include the forced auto scanning in the next versions but I think it's better to let users choose themselves, because it's simpler to tick off channels if you know the frequencies than to wait for the scanning to stop (though in my case it took only a minute) and disable undesirable channels. However, it's not that important and it can be even better for an inexperienced user. That was how the guys at Compro explained the forced auto scanning.

The sensitivity of the VideoMate TV Gold Plus is on the level of the previous record-breaker EZ-TV as it caught all the existent channels. The fine tuning

which can be enabled with the Fine Tune button wasn't actually needed. The empty channels couldn't be avoided, though it always was a side effect of good sensitivity.

Cyrillic names are well supported

On the next tab (Video/Audio )

you can change video parameters, aspect ratio (the Custom mode makes it arbitrarily changeable) and audio format (mono/stereo). The sleep mode can also be adjusted (this useful option is rarely supported in tuners).

The Recording tab deals with recording parameters.

What a surprise - all the stuff fit into a single tab. Remember that the ComproPVR supports only MPEG1 and MPEG2 formats.

On the Timeshifting tab you can change resolution, video and audio bitrates, buffer size and turn on/off Noise Removal and Video Smoothing

The last tab named System Devices allows changing audio and video devices, adjust the audio-in for recording and playing (note that the tuner can be connected to the card's AUX port)

Quality

The image quality is really good; but I can't say whether it was the tricks above that helped.