Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick

First I suggest gong to antennaweb.org and for the location of his lake house see how many digital channels are available OTA with a resonable priced antenna.

Correct it lets your PC act like a TV.
Web TV does not use a TV tuner card and normally requires a broadband internet connection and does not support Live standard networks at full resolution.

If your FIL wants to use it for a satellite dish or other analog input (VCR/DVD etc.) beware that they appear to have a problem with their MPEG encoder. The video from the Composite/SVideo input is very bright and washed out (very little color) as compared to other sources of video on my computer.

Other than that, and the terrible Pinnacle support that I received about this issue, it is a decent ATSC tuner (on Par with the Hauppauge PCI tuner I replaced - but a little slower). I would not buy another one though.

dmatch

S-video or composite will by design look washed or grainy when upscaled to a HDTV since by specification it is transmitted in 480i SD resolutiion.

Not this bad. If it was designed this way it was poorly designed. The same analog source can be hooked directly to my HDTV, which also has to upscale it, and it does not suffer near as much. Furthermore, when compared to a Happauge PCI card it looks really washed out and bright and it also has to upscale.

I'm not talking a little washed out. I'm talking about mucho.

The problem seems to be a poorly designed Pinnacle MPEG encoder.

dmatch

Apparently the Pinacle card uses a software encoder built into the driver instead of a hardware encoder chip on the tuner itself like the Hauppauge card for processing analog inputs. Pinnacle has apparently traded off the PQ of its recordings to reduce the CPU utilization of the software encoder.
If the PC is doing any upscsaling that the PQ being output is also highly dependent on the quality of the graphics/vido chips upscaling algortithims.

Apparently so, and it was a poor trade off in my opinion.

dmatch

I have the Pinnacle PCTV HD and it works as well as I could expect, but the software sucks. When I installed it, it seemed to work fine, then it said there was an upgrade to the software, so I upgraded. From that point on I've had problems, and used their registry cleaner tool, and finally just re-installed the older version, Seems to work again, but not great.

I was recording a HD show off of Fox the other night, and my screen went black. Later on, I discovered that it did record, but wasn't bringing the video to the screen while live. I don't know what the problem was with that.

Does anyone know of free software that will control the tuner?

I don't.

BTW, At one time there was a discussion at the pinnacle forums about replacing the MPEG encoder with another one. I haven't been brave enough to try it though.

http://forums.pinnaclesys.com/forums/post/140538.aspx

It took me so long to achieve a stable/useable system I am hesitant to do anything to it.

Th MPEG encoder should not effect anything to do with HDTV (digital TV) since the MPEG encoder is not required for that and is only used to convert analog to digital.

dmatch

I've had this for a while. Works great and I just upgraded to Vista 64 Home Premium and use it with Windows Media Center. I haven't tried to record using WMC yet and didn't bother to install the Pinnacle software after I upgraded. I have the USB so I can transfer it to my bedroom PC and a car PC I'm working on. You need a 2.4 GHZ processor for HD broadcasts.

Do you use the analog (composite or SVideo) input?

If so what does the quality look like. I'm not talking about OTA/CABLE HDTV here but the external inputs for analog on the stick. Some people hook up a satellite receiver to it using red, white, yellow connections.

dmatch