More About The AVerMedia M780

We find ourselves pretty smitten with this card for a variety of geeky reasons, which we must now recount. First and foremost, this is the first truly practical use for the PCIe x1 slots that have adorned so many motherboards that we’ve worked with over the past three or four years. This also gives us more reason to pay attention to where vendors position those slots, because on some motherboards, double-wide graphics cards can occlude access. This was no problem on the Asus M2A-VM, where the PCIe x1 slot is all the way over on the left-hand edge of the motherboard viewed from the front, and the PCIe x16 slot is in the middle of the board.

We also found that the card permits simultaneous reception of one or two OTA sources (for analog as well as digital signals) as well as accommodating unencrypted cable content. Most cable- (and satellite-) based HD is encrypted, which is part of the reason why it’s not accessible through this and other TV tuner/capture cards in North America. The board also includes a 3D comb MPEG-2 hardware decoder that can handle codec functions without loading down the CPU - the CPU utilization difference between this card and the older AVermedia A180 HDTV card differed by 20-40% while processing HDTV signals, and sometimes even more. Its dual tuners also permit viewing of one program of any kind while recording one or two other programs, but only one each of NTSC and ATSC on the recording side, as its resident tuners should lead you to expect.

AVerMedia claims that the M780 works with Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate versions with the same facility with which we observed it handling Windows MCE 2005. Because we haven’t yet set up our test rigs to handle the Vista side of the Windows media street, we’ll have to take their word for it for now, though other reports on this card don’t make mention of difficulties, as you’d expect them to if there were pervasive troubles.

You can purchase the M780 in one of two forms. A "white box" version is available from a limited number of vendors for around £45. For that modest sum, you get the card, the low profile bracket, three two-sided brochures, an S-Video to composite video adapter plug, a mini-RCA audio jack to right and left channel female RCA connectors, and an 8-pin to 10-pin adapter cable. We had to do some digging to learn that the adapter cable is designed to pick up front panel S-Video, Composite Video, and stereo (L/R) audio inputs and route them to the tuner, which obviates any need to hook up to the back of the card. See the AVerMedia product manager’s post to TheGreenButton.com, a well-known source for MCE info.