There are two kinds of TV tuner: analogue, which supports five channels and will be obsolete inside six years, and digital, which gives you 40 and won’t be. Anybody putting a TV tuner into a PC, perhaps a media centre box for the living room, wants digital, also known as DVB-T. To record and view different channels simultaneously, though, you need two cards, plugged into two expansions slots… until now.

Terratec is the first company to realise the goal of a dual-tuner DVB-T card, taking just one slot to perform the record-and-view double act. Its Cinergy 2400i DT has just one socket on its back panel, for a TV aerial feed. It splits the signal between its two tuners internally.

A little surprisingly, this is a PCI Express x1 card, so will only fit comparatively recent system motherboards and limits the choice of Micro ATX boards or barebones systems you can use it with. You can see Terratec’s logic, though, as PCI Express is looking like the future of expansion slots.

The card comes with a copy of Cyberlink’s PowerCinema 4. This Windows XP Media Center Edition look-alike offers most of the functionality of a Media Center, but sits happily on top of Windows XP Home, so if you’re upgrading, you won’t need to buy a new operating system to get the PVR (Personal Video Recorder) features of MCE. It also comes with a Media Center-compatible remote control and an infra-red link for the PC end.

Under test, it scanned and located all the expected Freeview channels without problem. Picture quality is good, partly due to the use of high-sensitivity Thomson tuners, and we successfully recorded programmes from one channel, while watching another – the key feature. Assuming the rest of the spec of your host PC (processor, memory and hard drive) supports it, the Cinergy 2400i DT achieves with one card what previously needed two.

This is a solution a lot of PC builders have been waiting for. There’s an OEM version of the card, without the remote or software, for manufacturers building machines from scratch, but the retail version, reviewed here, is a high-value way of getting quality TV onto your monitor and into your PVR.