How to Turn Your PC Into a TV Set
Mixing television with personal computing is not necessarily the same thing as mixing video and personal computing.
Recently, Apple and others have announced forthcoming innovations that will allow Macintosh users to mix video clips with ordinary documents, creating something called desktop video.
DesktopTV, on the other hand, is quite different. It is a $395 color television set on a single circuit board that plugs into personal computers equipped with color VGA monitors and internal construction compatible with the IBM PC/AT design.
A model is also available for PC/XT-compatible computers with color EGA graphics monitors.
The DesktopTV board allows you to play television broadcasts or videotapes or laser discs on your computer screen. Then, you can switch back and forth with whatever program you have running on the computer.
Television addicts without room in their offices for a television set might be in the market for this device. A more legitimate use might be found in corporations that use training or corporate communications videos extensively.
An inexpensive VCR plugged into the DesktopTV board would make it easy to use training videos to learn how to operate computer programs.
The full-length board was a tight fit in my computer but otherwise not hard to install. There are warnings on the board and in the manual against letting it come into side-to-side contact with adjacent boards, which caused me to remove another board to assure adequate clearance.
You move the cable of your color VGA monitor from its normal connection to the VGA adapter card in your computer to a connection on the back of the DesktopTV board. Then, using a short cable provided in the kit, you connect the DesktopTV board and the VGA board. A small external speaker is also provided, which plugs into the back of the board. Volume is controlled by software.
A standard 300-ohm TV antenna connection lets you tie the unit to cable TV, an antenna, a VCR or a laser disc player. The television board receives all cable channels that you have available.
When you use your computer as a computer, its video signal travels unimpeded from the VGA board through the DesktopTV board and out to your monitor. But when you use the software program that comes with the unit to switch to TV, the signal from the computer is intercepted by the DesktopTV board, which replaces it with a TV signal and sends that out to your monitor.
The picture was a little washed out and fuzzy compared to a mediocre-quality color television I had sitting next to it, despite claims in the product brochure that the image would be sharper and “superior to standard television monitors.”
DesktopTV comes with control software that works under Windows, but it doesn’t allow you to see the TV image in a small window on the screen. You can have either a full-size television image or full-size computer screen, but not both at once. You don’t need Windows to use DesktopTV because other software is included that runs as a standard DOS program.
To display a television image as a small window on a computer screen requires that the video image be digitized, which is what Apple’s recent announcement was all about.
DesktopTV for the PC does not digitize anything, so its usefulness is mostly limited to watching full-screen video broadcasts or VCR playbacks on your computer screen. For well under $395, you could buy a better color TV and set it beside your computer monitor and see both at once, which is exactly what I do at home.
One additional feature of DesktopTV is the ability to hear the broadcast as you work on computer programs. Then if you heard something that you wanted to see, you could switch over to television viewing in a couple of seconds.
The Windows implementation of the DesktopTV control software is clever. It looks like a remote control unit on the computer screen, and you use the mouse to click on number, volume and channel up/down buttons to control it.
When you switch back from television to computer use, a small TV icon is shown at the bottom of the Windows screen, displaying on its tiny picture of a TV screen the channel number you were watching.
DesktopTV is made by Aview Technology Inc. of Buffalo, N.Y., (800) 866-7288.
