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Chris TV 3.60

R. Mohan, May 09, 2004 0000 hrs IST

TV-Tuners cards have always attracted a very large audience especially in the Indian market

Expert Rating:

Feature-Rich, Mosaic/Zoom/slideshow

Doesn�t support all TV-Tuner cards

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EXPERT REVIEW

TV-Tuners cards have always attracted a very large audience especially in the Indian market with most users willing to spend a couple of thousands just to watch their favourite TV shows in peace on their PC rather than watch those senseless family dramas. Normally, TV-Tuners come with their own software, which have very few features like Auto-scanning of channels and adjusting volume controls. What if you would like to have many more features rather than just the standard? Let's see if this software suits your needs.

Interface
The Chris TV 3.60 Standard Edition is a TV-Tuner software meant for viewing your favourite channels in a fashioned manner as well as providing more features. This software is very user-friendly and the overall interface is impressive with a quick-start application available in the system-tray in the form of the Chris TV Agent. The software detects the TV-Tuner very easily and also checks if the hardware has support for radio tuning. The configuration panel, accessible from the system tray, shows you the audio- and video-capture source and options like enabling Multi-monitor feature, zoom function and Dscaler de-interlacing filter (if you already have it pre-installed).

Once the channels are scanned, the menu can be accessed in both normal mode and advanced mode. The same menu can also be accessed by just right clicking directly on the screen you are viewing. This menu gives you many options like changing the screen resolutions, the aspect ratio (16:9 or 4:3), the driver settings, channel settings, and programme settings. There are new features like video recording, image capture, Mosaic, and Slideshow, which are very interesting.

The Channel settings window gives a wide range of information like Channel name, the frequency (KHz), the type and mode, and many more including the brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, and volume adjustment, which can be changed for individual channels. The same window includes options for the radio as well. One can do an automatic scan, perform a new scan, or add new channels at the same time. The viewing type is automatically chosen between NTSC and PAL formats. The software's overall interface is very innovative with loads of features.

Performance
This TV-Tuner card software gives you all the typical functions that you would normally expect from such a software. The clarity produced is very decent and one can change the resolution of your choice (clarity also depends on the hardware used). The General settings window is the thing that you should look out for, as this is the core of the software. It gives you various options like the Image and Sound settings, Video rendering settings, Driver settings, Video recording and Radio settings, Zoom functions etc.