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Vitor Martins Augusto
TELE-audiovision
Test Center
Portugal
TELE-audiovision.com/11/03/tenow
More about this company
46 TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 03-04/2013 — TELE-audiovision.com
out CI, for PCI-e or USB. And
let’s not forget the excep-
tional quality and attention
to detail that highlight all of
TBS’s cards.
If you want to comfortably
watch TV on your PC, wheth-
er its through a TV applica-
tion or with a multimedia PC
that, for example, works with
the Windows Media Center,
the TBS 6991 gives you an
easy to install TV card that
leaves nothing to be desired
and works in harmony with
nearly every TV application.
And yet the TBS 6991 is
also interesting for DXers
and professionals. The com-
plete support of CrazyScan,
TSReader and TransEdit to-
gether with its twin tuners
and CI slots provide for a
wide range of possibilities.
Even some higher-end signal
analyzers can’t keep up with
all of these functions, espe-
cially when it comes to trans-
port stream analysis.
We’re not only thrilled with
the TBS 6991; we’re actually
putting more of them in our
test PCs!
out TSReader and used it to
see whether or not our cable
provider incorporated valid
NIT tables in the stream –
a network scan from DVB
Dream could not find any ad-
ditional transponders. Thanks
to TSReader we were able to
determine that it was not with
the provider.
If it’s finding errors in the
stream or to just simply see
all the details, TSReader is
the tool for advanced ama-
teurs and professionals. Be-
cause of this it was important
for us to see how far the har-
monization between the TBS
6991 and TSReader went.
This test was much too fast
in that you only had to se-
lect “DVB-S BDA compatible
source” as the source.
In the next step the re-
ception parameters are
selected like normal after
which TSReader begins ana-
lyzing the numerous PIDs
within the stream. Inserted
CAMs, as was already the
case with Windows Media
Center, are controlled by the
TBS-MCECITool that must
be started on demand. This
interrupts the stream which
then has to be newly restart-
ed from within TSReader. A
restart of TSReader is not
necessary.
Thanks to the twin tuners,
two different TV applications
can be started at the same
time with the requirement
that they both use different
tuners. Even though the TBS
6991 occupies only one PCI-
e slot, it can be operated as
if there were two separate
cards.
We could therefore, for ex-
ample, use TSReader with
tuner A while CrazyScan was
performing a scan on tuner B.
We should not forget to men-
tion that ending one of the
applications will interrupt the
stream on the other applica-
tion. In this case the stream
would have to be restarted.
If you have the full version
of DVB Viewer, it will include
a tool called TransEdit. This
program primarily serves to
create channel lists through
scanning that is based either
on transponder lists or the
manual entry of transponder
data. Alternatively, a Blind-
scan can also be performed
but it does not utilize the pos-
sibilities that the TBS 6991
tuner offers. For this reason
a Blindscan like this is sig-
nificantly slower compared
to CrazyScan. TransEdit can
do something else; it can
perform a transport stream
analysis in which it lists all
the PIDs. Additionally, com-
plete transponders or only
those selected PIDs can be
streamed to a hard drive.
The scan is very comfortable;
you need only click on a tran-
The TBS 6991 with TSReader
Full featured DVB-S/S2 card with PCI-e
Twin Tuner
2x CI for PayTV
Fully supported by Windows Media Center
Fully supported by CrazyScan, TSReader and
TransEdit
Ideal for satellite TV viewing
Ideal for DX and professional applications
None
Expert Opinion
sponder to list all the availa-
ble channels from a scan. An
additional double-click on one
of the listed channels opens a
new window with the live TV
picture.
TBS (Tenow), with its TBS
6991, has once again shown
how perfectly designed a PC
card can be. The TBS prod-
uct palette includes cards in
every conceivable version,
whether it’s DVB-S/S2, DVB-
C or DVB-T/T2, with or with-