hello all.
I'm just beginning to build my mac mini ht setup
and wondered if anyone has used this little product.
I have a tvmicro from miglia and it works great but encoding to
atv format takes ages for my ppc 1.42. I guess this product encodes
in atv format from the start so that would be great. It's also cheaper( amazon $90) than
the only other hardware encoder I could find that encodes in atv format, the miglia tvmax+.
anyone have experience with pinnacle products?

thanx

Well I received this today along with the miglia tvmax+ and did a side by side.
I am basically connecting to s-video on a dish 211 receiver along with the hdmi out to the tv and streaming to a appletv also to the tv.
All i can say is don't get the pinnacle video capture for mac. Before I ordered I called pinnacle to ask about the product and was specifically told that it includes a tv tuner and some sort of a epg. Well I guess pinnacle doesn't know it's own product very well because it doesn't. All the software lets you do is basically start and stop recording. Pretty basic. It encodes to mpeg-4 auto matically and sends it to itunes right away after you stop recording. quality is okay. There is no option to changepicture settings such as contrast, hue, etc... It's basically only a capture device.
The miglia is the complete opposite of this. It includes its own proprietary software that can schedule through titantv and has the ability to change picture settings and can send recordings to itunes(atv).It has different encoding choices for ipod(3 levels), dvd, iphone, etc. The quality is also better i noticed than the pinnacle. When I played the recordings back on a panasonic th-50phuk via appletv there seemed to be no noticeable difference than the original.

Well I hope this helps some people who record from satellite. I'm probably going to keep the tvmax+ and send the pinnacle back.

Thanks for posting, sonar25. I've been wondering about these 2 devices. Assuming you've returned the pinnacle, do you recall if it gave you any compression choices at all? Like different bitrates for ipod vs. appletv? I have an email exchange going with Pinnacle support where I seem to know more about their product than they do. But all I want to do is digitize some old Hi-8 material, and I like the bus-powered aspect of the pinnacle. Of course I also prefer its price.

Are you recording in MPEG-4 with the Miglia? For your recordings that look just like the originals, what bit rate are you using?

Thanks,
Chris