AVerMedia Readies New Tuner Products, Receives Award

By Doug Lung
published

Look for two new portable ATSC tuners from AVerMedia in January. AVerMedia announced that two of its units, the AVerTV Hybrid VolarMax and the AVerTV Hybrid NanoExpress, were selected as CES 2008 Innovations Design and Engineering Award winners in the video accessories category.

The AVerTV Hybrid VolarMax is a flash-drive sized USB tuner while the AVerTV Hybrid NanoExpress is a 54mm ExpressCard tuner. Both support off-air ATSC reception, as well as “ClearQAM” unencrypted digital cable TV reception. One nice feature of both tuners is that they support H.264 video compression, allowing high quality HDTV recording, while requiring much less hard disk space than would be needed to store an MPEG-2 transport stream data.

The AVerMedia news release did not specify the tuner and demodulator chips used in the tuners nor did it indicate whether the H.264 compression was being done in hardware or in software running on the PC.

Doug Lung
Doug Lung

Doug Lung is one of America's foremost authorities on broadcast RF technology. As vice president of Broadcast Technology for NBCUniversal Local, H. Douglas Lung leads NBC and Telemundo-owned stations’ RF and transmission affairs, including microwave, radars, satellite uplinks, and FCC technical filings. Beginning his career in 1976 at KSCI in Los Angeles, Lung has nearly 50 years of experience in broadcast television engineering. Beginning in 1985, he led the engineering department for what was to become the Telemundo network and station group, assisting in the design, construction and installation of the company’s broadcast and cable facilities. Other projects include work on the launch of Hawaii’s first UHF TV station, the rollout and testing of the ATSC mobile-handheld standard, and software development related to the incentive auction TV spectrum repack. A longtime columnist for TV Technology, Doug is also a regular contributor to IEEE Broadcast Technology. He is the recipient of the 2023 NAB Television Engineering Award. He also received a Tech Leadership Award from TV Tech publisher Future plc in 2021 and is a member of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society and the Society of Broadcast Engineers.