Its a good job the black box police haven't looked under your TV recently, Video / DVD / HiFi / DTT receiver / PVR where does it all end!

What if you want to control some of this from a PC or laptop, this is quite a logical step as a PVR (personal video recorder) is just a big hard disk with a video capture card (a bit like a PC then) and combining a DTT or Digital satellite recorder is another easy step. Hauppauge has been making PC cards for the last few years staring with analogue TV cards and moving into digital satellite, however PC cards don't suite all applications and Laptops have little space for them.

The Hauppauge USB Win TV DEC2000t product deals with this by keeping the DTT receiver outboard in a neatly styled unit that connects to your laptop or PC via USB, from your machine you have full control over the decoder or you can use the supplied remote control to drive the unit directly. The Hauppauge decodes the full UK DTT multiplexes giving 30 channels of "Freeview TV" and a selection of digital radio stations and displays this on your PC or via a scart output on the rear of the unit for direct connection to a screen or projector.

The supplied Win TV software allows for 16:9 or 4:3 viewing and does a fairly good job of decoding a quality MPEG2 stream, its rare for the unit to have any stalls in decoding unlike many of the current crop of black box DTT decoders. The inbuilt record facility can be set to wake and record at a set time or a quick one button press will switch into record mode, recordings are named with the channel and record time. One feature that is missing as standard is the ability to link to a web based EPG, the option given is an interface to TVTV.co.uk which at 19.80 Euros including VAT for a year isn't bad but would it hurt to give year one in the price?

It is a fairly sophisticated bit of software and you can use the online listings for free @ www.tvtv.co.uk the integration applet available from the Hauppauge site allows you to mark programmes on the web to be recorded and then download them to your PC ready to run as a job list, of course this isn't really a patch on Sky+ but then we aren't subscribing to sky are we!

In terms of EPG the now next is displayed on screen and the guide can be accessed to show you information provided by broadcasters about the programme you are viewing. There is also a timed delay feature where you can start recording while you go make tea etc and then pickup from where you left off, the recording quality is configurable and at its highest setting a 30gb disk could hold 20 hours of programmes.

Downsides are getting hold of a DEC2000t they are getting a little rare now, the DEC1000 is cheaper but still quite good but without some of the hooks and features, otherwise for a technically minded user the DEC2000t is a dream to drive and worthy of our recommendation.

Hauppauge DEC2000-T Digital Terrestrial...