The Nebula Digi-TV USB is a digital tuner and USB2 hub in a small plastic box. It has RF input and output, four USB2 outputs, a USB type A input and power connector.
The Nebula software has obviously been designed as a PVR application. Almost all the functions are easily available from the One-for-All remote control that is supplied with the device. Unfortunately, the software does not as yet support the VIA’s on board MPEG2 hardware acceleration, and this makes the ME6000 board too slow to smoothly playback the TV files. Nebula are working on supporting the VIA’s hardware but until then a faster board is required.
January 2004 - Enter the Nehemiah.
I was so impressed with the Nebula software that I decided to upgrade the PVR’s mother board with VIA’s much faster M10000N Nehemiah offering.
The only difference between the ME6000 and the Nehemiah are the very necessary extra heat sinks and a very noisy 40mm fan. The extra heat this board generates will require re-think the air flow ducting in my box.
The Nebula software uses all the Nehemiah’s extra power, even requiring use of the software’s ‘low power cpu’ setting to give the smoothest operation. It works, but I’m hoping it will not be too long until Nebula have the software optimised for the VIA board.
