akuhn's Full Review: Pinnacle PCTV™ Deluxe (210100231) Video Capture
My introduction to the Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe began when I recieved a call from one of my regular clients I do home tech support for. They were attempting to use the device to capture home movies recorded on a Camcorder.
The PCTV Deluxe would show up as a capture device in Sony DVD Studio - but it wouldn't capture video. Selecting the device and then selecting "begin capture" would result in "device not ready".
I uninstalled/reinstalled drivers.
I swapped USB Ports.
I reinstalled/uinstalled software.
I updated Sony Studio with patches.
I tried beta drivers from pinnacle.
Nothing worked.
I spent a good two hours on a machine trying everything under the sun to get this device to work. The manual claims WDM Driver capture support. All the marketing speak on the glitzy box and website speaks of the joys of "Create DVD's from your home videos!" Two hours later all we had was a headache.
The person I was helping eventually got so frustrated with the PCTV Deluxe they went out and bought a cheap video capture device for $50. This no name generic device they bought works perfectly to this day. On my way out, they handed me the PCTV Deluxe and told me "I never want to see this piece of garbage again"
So I thought - let me take a shot at the Pinnacle box on my computer at home. I'm A Plus and MCDST certified. My dayjob is a Technical Support Analyst. I solve computer problems all day long. I thought that maybe the problems with the device were Windows problems. Perhaps if I installed this on my own PC I could get it to work. I couldn't be more wrong ..
Strike 1 - AVI Video capture
I brought the Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe home, downloaded the latest drivers from Pinnacles website and installed it. I navigated my way into the extremely popular open-source VirtualDub video editor application. Selected File/Capture AVI. The Pinnacle PCTV deluxe shows up in the list. I click OK - Error 418 - Capture Device was not detected.
Ok - so maybe VirtualDub doesn't play nice with USB Devices. I spent a good four hours downloading every single open source, freeware, and shareware video capture application I could get my hands on.
Only one ended up working - a small application called AMCap based on some Windows DirectX9 example source code. The problem with AMCap was - it only let me capture video off this device in MPEG2 precompressed format.
Anyone who does any video editing knows that you need to be able to grab video in an uncompressed AVI format to do editing at a later time. The PCTV Deluxe simply doesn't seem to work. WDM Driver support is _non-existant_ for this device. I can't capture AVIs from this device
Strike 2 - Bundled Software
"Turn your PC into a Personal Video Recorder
Take control of your TV. Watch what you want, when you want, and how you want!" says Pinnacle.
The capture device comes bundled with an application called PCTV Vision. My first experience with PCTV Vision was a nice Windows Exception Error. Otherwise known as - it crashed. I rebooted my PC.
I loaded up PCTV Vision again. This time I heard audio from the channels, but no video. I exited the application - it crashed.
I ran PCTV Vision again. Finally I received video plus sound. But wait ... why's everything all choppy? I attempted to tune to another channel. 10 seconds later, I had another choppy channel. I should note here that 10 seconds is about the average time it takes to change channels for me. The new channel was still choppy. I exited the application - and ... it crashed. Again.
I Removed the PCTV Deluxe from the USB 2.0 Port I had it plugged into, and plugged it into another USB 2.0 port. I loaded up PCTV Vision and and it worked perfectly. Very strange.
If you have any ideas about using Pinnacle as a Personal Video Rcorder - throw those thoughts out the window. PCTV Vision offers only the most primitive of timeshifting /PVR functionality.
Timeshifting functionality requires you to click a record button within the interface to turn on timeshifting. Once you do this, the system will begin to buffer video. You may rewind/fast forward in your saved timeshifting buffer. I found fast forwarding/rewinding to be extremely slow with lots of frame stuttering when time shifting was on. I have a 1.53Ghz CPU, 512MB RAM, and a 7200 RPM Hard drive - I know the problem is not my computer.
When time shifting is on you will see a time indicator that displays how far you are "behind" liveTV. I encounted an odd issue when my counter kept flipping back and forth between -0:08 and -0:09, almost like it couldn't make up its mind if I was 8 or 9 seconds behind live TV. Obviously this application didn't receive a lot of QA Testing while it was in development.
Scheduling of shows can only be done on a "VCR-Like" interface. You select the channel, time to start, time to end your show. You can create reoccuring schedules, or one-time recordings. There is no guide data in the application, and you must manually name your channel numbers. By default everything is named Channel 1, Channel 2, etc.
Strike 3 - MPEG2 Capture
If there's one thing I actually got to work on this card - it's capturing in MPEG2 Mode. Unfortunately, the quality was so terrible it was not even worth it.
I was able to use PCTV Vision to capture VHS Tapes from the RCA inputs on the front of the device, and also the TV Tuner inputs. Unfortunately - the captured material looks really bad. PCTV allows you to select predefined bitrate profiles (SVCD, DVD, etc), as well as define your own custom bitrate. I selected a bitrate of 5000, which is more then enough to capture my basic Analog Cable input.
I proceded to record approximately 5 minutes of live television. After stopping the recording, I opened my recorded file. Playback looked terrible. Heavy MPEG2 Compression artifacts in the form of blocks could be seen all over the image. The image looked extremely washed out and blurry.
By comparison, I own a Series 1 Tivo. I recall that the Tivo uses a bitrate of approximately 2100 I believe. This Tivo feeds from the same cable feed I tested the PCTV on. The quality of the Tivo's video files (which are also stored in MPEG2) are far superior compared to the PCTV Deluxe captures.
You're Outta here!
I didn't think it's possibile, but I feel ripped off and I didn't even pay for the Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe. I recall a few years ago that Pinnacle was a respected brand name in video capture devices. After my experience with this product, I will never reccomend a Pinnacle product to anyone.
Search the Interent and you will find page after page of people having similar problems with lockups, non-existent WDM Capture support, and application crashes.
Pinnacle either
a) Doesn't know what to do about these problems
or
b) Doesn't care.
The Pinnacle support website currently contains a 1.7 beta driver for the PCTV Deluxe that hasn't been updated in 3 months.
And before you ask - yes, I _did_ try the "stable" 1.5 Driver that was included on the Driver CD - it was even worse.
Steer clear of this product - there are much more inexpensive video capture/TV Tuner solutions on the market such as the Happauage WinTV-150 cards. These can currently be obtained in OEM for around $70 from various vendors and unlike the PCTV Deluxe have a stable driver set, the support of a company who cares about their product, and extensive third party application support.
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