I can only suspect that perhaps your USB port is working at USB 1.1 speed instead of USB 2.

Do you get any warning in the form of a pop up balloons saying that your USB port is working at a suboptimum speed when you connect the TV tuner?

Bacillus,

No, I did not get the pop-up when connecting the tuner.  Also, I first had the tuner connected directly to the laptop's USB and had the jerky motion problem.  I later connected through the Kensington dock and had the same problem.

The tuner does not show up in Device Manager under USB connections.  It does show under Multimedia Devices (I think).  Is there a way to determine the speed of the port in Device Manager?

Thanks.

all the usb ports should be capable of usb2 operation.

may be worth uninstalling everything under usb in device manager then rebooting and let windows re-enumerate all the usb hardware.

suggest you also check that your hdd hasn't slipped into pio mode whilst in device manager.

more importantly is the current transfer mode set to udma 5 or pio?

Yes, the transfer mode is set to "Ultra DMA Mode 5".

I'm having the exact same problem.  It's sometimes not immediately obvious, but it is especially aparent when watching consistent motion like smooth panning - it's quite jerky.   I've tried all the above suggestions and contacted dell support, but it hasn't helped.  Has anyone else had any luck with this yet? 

Perhaps more importantly, can anyone confirm that the Angel USB tuner is EVER capable of delivering full frame-rate video?  If it's just a poor design then I'm happy to return it a buy a better one (better than wasting all this time on it).

Thanks,

   Rick

RickMB,

Do you notice that the hard drive is constantly active while watching live TV?  Mine is and I'm not sure it needs to be.  It seems to me that the video could be cached to RAM (I have 2GB) rather than the disk and that this would be faster (and better for the disk drive).  I have not been able to find any settings that allow you to control how memory/disk resources are used to cache the video.

 

I also tried recording live TV to see if the problem was peculiar to watching in "real time".  It seems that the recorded stream captured the same video that is displayed (jittery).  Since the dropped frames occurred in the same segments of the video, I assume this is a capture problem and not a play-back problem.

Yes, the hard drive is constantly active.  I assumed it was to support arbitrary rewinding for live TV (I haven't played with it much, but I haven't noticed any limit on how far I can rewind when watching live TV). 

It would be interesting to see what happens if recording of live TV could be disabled (eg. perhaps there is some registry setting or something).  If it affects the live TV quality, then it would confirm that disk I/O is causing the jerkieness.  If not, then perhaps it is just USB throughput.  Of course, either way, recording TV would still be problematic.

Rick