Features:
The AVerMedia design is PCI Express x1, thus making this card attractive to anyone with a newer system with unused PCI Express slots, and thanks to dearth of PCIe x1 peripherals this would be most people with a recent Media Center PC.
The M780 uses a Micronas APB 7202A nGene chip as its' host bus interface chip. For digital TV AVerMedia went with a well proven option: LG's "5th Generation" DT3303 ATSC demodulator, this is the same family of chips the popular DVICO Fusion 5 series uses. This means it should have good multi-path interference compensation. The final component is the NEC µPD61153, an analog TV hardware MPEG2 encoding chip, which was also used on AVerMedia's excellent AverTV Purity 3D 250.
Support for the M780 is quite good under Windows: SageTV, BeyondTV, GB-PVR, and of course Windows Media Center 2005 and Vista all work with it. Linux support is a bit more bleek because of the fact that the PCI Express host interface chips are so new it takes quite a bit of time to get open source drivers developed.
The card itself is low profile and so forgoes RCA (phono) style audio input as well as a dedicated composite video jack. Nicely, AVerMedia includes a stereo mini-jack to RCA cable for the audio line-in and an s-video to composite video adapter. Oddly enough, like all other AVerMedia white box products I've dealt with, no driver CD is included, instead the URL to drivers is printed on the top of the box.
