Hi everyone, i just recently recieved my friends sony Giga pocket tv tuner card, i am not running either a sony vaio, or windows media center, and i was wondering, if i could find the correct drivers for it, and a app that would run with this card, i tried looking for houres on sonys site, and a few other, any help would be appreciated!

• Tv Tuner Card Software
• Giga Pocket Download

1. The film roll image of an exported Giga Pocket Video Capsule is incorrect. Intel® Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU; 512 MB RAM memory; External graphics card. UPDATE Sony® TV Tuner Library Update This utility installs an updated version of the Sony® TV Tuner Library to address the error, 'TV Tuner in use by another.
2. May 16, 2007  Does anyone know or have the SONY GIGA POCKET PCVA-IMB5A TV TUNER CARD drivers and giga pocket software? If you can help me this would really save me a lot of money and time. I tried and talked with Sony but they couldn't help me. So if anyone knows where to get the driver and the giga pocket software, I would really appreciate it.

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This page contains information about installing the latest Sony TV Tuner driver downloads using the Sony Driver Update Tool.

Sony TV Tuner drivers are tiny programs that enable your TV Tuner hardware to communicate with your operating system software. Maintaining updated Sony TV Tuner software prevents crashes and maximizes hardware and system performance. Using outdated or corrupt Sony TV Tuner drivers can cause system errors, crashes, and cause your computer or hardware to fail. Furthermore, installing the wrong Sony drivers can make these problems even worse.

Recommendation: If you are inexperienced with updating Sony device drivers manually, we highly recommend downloading the Sony TV Tuner Driver Utility. This tool will download and update the correct Sony TV Tuner driver versions automatically, protecting you against installing the wrong TV Tuner drivers.

Sony VAIO RA-810G Media Center PC

When we heard that Sony was shipping a “liquid-cooled” PC, visions of pumps, hoses and thermal fluid danced in our heads. As it turns out, Sony’s new VAIO RA-810G uses a more prosaic heat-pipe solution to cooling the 3.4GHz, Prescott-based Pentium 4 processor.

We were also intrigued, however, because the RA-810G uses Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition as its operating system. We’ve reviewed Media Center PCs in the past, including the Gateway FMC-901X and Dell 4600C. Alas, Gateway seems to have stopped shipping the FMC-901X, which was one of the better living room PCs we’ve encountered from a major OEM. Dell offers Windows Media Center edition now on most of its PCs, with the apparent exception of the trim 4600C.

Home theater PCs (HTPCs) are becoming less viable as time goes on, mainly due to the growing number of standalone DVRs and digital set-top boxes that will do the same thing and look better in the living room to boot. So this new Sony VAIO seems targeted squarely at home offices and dorm rooms, where a “do-everything” PC makes sense. Does Sony’s Swiss Army Knife approach work? We take the 810G for a spin to find out.

Tv Tuner Card Software

The new VAIO’s chassis offers clean, spare lines, without much embellishment. It’s most distinguishing feature from the outside is that it appears to be a small box atop a larger box, separated by a channel nearly large enough to pass an arm through.

Here’s the VAIO RA-810G’s component inventory:

The top section holds the optical drives and power supplies. The lower section houses the motherboard, hard drive and expansion cards. The gap between upper and lower sections is real, but the top and bottom are connected via sturdy channels.

In fact, it’s really a single case with a gimmicky pass-through rather than two discrete halves joined together. If you look inside the case, you’ll note that it looks more like a single unit that external appearance might suggest.

As you’d expect from a system that tries to be everything for everyone, a wide array of inputs and outputs are built in. The back panel offers four USB ports, Ethernet, keyboard, mouse, parallel port and FireWire. No RS-232 port is present, but a full complement of Intel HD Audio inputs and outputs are. A separate TV tuner card consumes a PCI slot, as well as a softmodem. The TV tuner offers composite and component video support.

Front I/O is hidden under a flip-down door, which conceals headphone and microphone jacks, S-video out, composite and analog audio out, three more USB ports and a 4-pin, unpowered FireWire port.

Another door, which slides down, reveals the floppy and four slots for Memory
Stick, Compact Flash Type I and Type II, and IBM Micro Drive flash memory cards. The optical drives–one DVD-ROM and a combo DVD+/-RW drive, live behind doors that pop open when you eject the drive trays.

Giga Pocket Download

A 400W Delta Electronics power supply serves up more than enough juice for the system.

Access to the interior is quite easy. The hard drive was mounted in a removable bracket, which can accept a second drive. Getting at the internals of optical drives is somewhat trickier.

Overall fit and finish is solid, and the system is heavier than it appears.

The software included with the RA-810G reflects its targeted audience of home-entertainment users. Curiously, it includes both Sony’s Giga Pocket PVR software and Windows XP Media Center Edition, which has its own PVR capabilities. Also included is Sony’s Oxford Labs Studios package, which cleans up digital music recorded from analog sources like old vinyl records and cassette tapes.

For the budding videographer and photographer, Adobe Premiere LE, Photoshop Elements and PictureGear Studio are included. Rounding out the media software bundle is Intervideo’s WinDVD, VAIO Media “network file sharing,” and Sony’s own DVD authoring package. For those who also need office applications, Microsoft Works 7.0 and Intuit’s Quicken 2004 are also bundled.

All in all, it’s a rich, if somewhat schizophrenic, software bundle.
The RA-810G performance isn’t all that and a bag of chips. The 3.4GHz Pentium 4, based on the Prescott core, does have 1MB of L2 cache, but performance lags behind the older Northwood 3.4GHz by a bit. The system’s 3D gaming performance is really hobbled by the use of the Radeon X600 XT.

SYSmark 2004 performance trails a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 by about the margin you’d expect (224 versus 228 for Internet content creation; 175 versus 159 for office productivity). However, gaming and 3D performance is noticeably slower than similar systems running a GeForce 6800GT. Given that ATI’s latest X700 XT wasn’t shipping when we tested the VAIO, it’s not unlikely that Sony will adopt ATI’s latest mainstream graphics in a future version, which will substantially boost 3D performance.

For example, Doom3 at 1280x1024x32 posted a meager 18 fps, while Unreal Tournament 2004 eked out 35.12 fps at the same resolution. The VAIO fared well in multitasking and video encoding.

After performance testing, we started up Media Center Edition, and immediately encountered a glitch.

Recall that we earlier noted the VAIO software bundle, which included “VAIO Media network file sharing”. As it turns out, you need to start up the VAIO Media application before Windows Media Center could properly detect the TV tuner. However, you only have to do it once, not every time you start the PC.

We’ve covered Windows Media Center extensively in our review of the Dell Dimension 4600C media center PC, so check that out for more on Windows Media Center 2004 edition. The version included with the VAIO seemed to be the same 2004 version.

However, we were disappointed in overall video quality. We plugged in an analog cable TV connection, piping in the local Comcast basic cable service to the system. Sony provided us with an SDM-204B 20.1-inch LCD to handle video chores. Although it seemed attractive enough, the rated response time of 25ms seems a bit slow by today’s standards.

The display didn’t seem to be the problem. TV image quality was generally mediocre whatever the display. Sony’s Giga Pocket tuner card certainly didn’t seem to offer the same video quality as a Hauppauge WinTV 250 card we had in another system. The overall image seemed washed out, and we noted a number of visual artifacts that had nothing to do with the source material.

We also need to comment on audio quality. When we connected the system to a higher end set of speakers than the bundled Sony speakers, overall audio quality seemed clean and robust. However, the Sony speakers seemed anemic and tinny at best. The bass unit, which was about the size of two shoeboxes, pumped out weak bass and the overall sound quality of the two satellites seemed thin and uninspiring. If you buy an RA-810G, our advice is to lose the speakers as soon as possible and replace them with something cleaner and with more power.

The VAIO RA-810G can’t seem to make up its mind about what it is. It sports a relatively high-end processor, but its graphics aren’t on a par. A rich set of bundled software is aimed squarely at media junkies, but the image quality of the Giga Pocket TV tuner is barely up to 1999 PC TV standards.

If you’re interested in ripping your CD collection and making it available on your home network or editing your digital videos and photographs, the VAIO is a great one-stop shop. And Sony’s somewhat schizophrenic approach to software bundling does offer you the benefit of choice.

It’s clear that the Media Center PC is at a crossroads. Gateway is no longer offering it’s elegant FMC-910X, Dell is offering little that’s new, and Sony’s RA-810G can’t make up its mind what it’s good at. These systems tend to offer no component video support out of the box, and still use mini-jack connections for audio output. Until one of the major systems vendors makes a bolder statement in the living room PC arena, it seems that high-quality HTPCs may be relegated to either boutique resellers or people comfortable building their own systems.

1. www.sonystyle.com: http://www.sonystyle.com