Pinnacle USB 2.0 PCTV Deluxe Tuner and Video

I used on my pc and it works great.

I bought this product in March. I was quite happy with the ease of instalation and the quality of the TV picture on my monitor. However, now it is November and the tuner seems to have completely crapped out. I went to the Pinnacle web site, and I found out the guarantee is 30 days and the problem with total failure at 6 months or so is pretty common. I was directed to an on line b-board where there were a number of postings of buyers whose experience was exactly like mine. There seems to be no recourse or fix other than replacement at my cost.

The PCTV Deluxe is a combo tv tuner and video capture device. Installs easily via USB port. Accepts input via cable, composite or s-video ports. Has LED indicators on front showing which of these ports is active. The included "Vision" software allows you to watch live tv, time-shifted tv (think tivo) where you can pause but it continues recording and you can resume watching without missing a thing. You can also schedule shows to be recorded and then watch them when you want. Overall, it works very well for me. I would recommend that people with older systems without USB 2.0 ports go with a dedicated card instead of this.

Installation is straight forward and the unit has a very nice and compact design. The software PCTV vision software that's included require some serious rework; it tends to cause system to hang on Windows XP and the video freezes very often. On some system the remote controll become non-responsive and the screen will turn blank, even when there's signal from the cable. When switching channels sometimes the audio channel will be stuck in the previous channel. I found the software works better in Windows 2000 with P4. The PCTV unit does not work with any third party software such as Vegas video or PowerVCR. The bundled CD has a trial version of Studio 8 from Pinnacle, and you can't even use Studio 8 to capture video from PCTV Deluxe. The quality of video when viewing TV shows is nice and the mpeg encoder did a pretty good job except that you all encoded video are interlaced, you will have to deinterlace them yourself. This unit come with both S-video and Composite video input but quality is poor. I think this product has great potential, but unless Pinnacle fix up it's software and driver, I don't recommend wasting money on this product.

I bought this product wanting to watch TV on my PC. I purchased the USB version since I don't have any PCI slots left on my Dell 8200 running XP. Setup was easy, however the software is quite buggy. Everytime I would close the PCTV application, I would get the "Windows has encountered an error" popup box. Also, I purchased a DVD burner and once I installed the DVD burner software my PCTV software wouldn't run. So I had to reinstall the PCTV software to get it to work. After about 6 days, the PCTV software stopped running again. I checked Pinnacle's website for updated software, however they had an older version on their website than what actually shipped with the product. After all this, I decided to return it, and just go by a small TV to put by my computer.

I am very disappointed with this product. I was upgrading my video capture to include the PVR option, so I purchased this product. Big mistake. The remote control didn't seem to work at all, no matter how close I sat to the unit. It seemed to take forever to switch between channels. I am not one to surf, but I was still frustrated. After prolonged use, the box seemed to overheat, causing it to mysteriously change channels, mute the volume, or perform other strange behavior. The software was user friendly, but that is little consolation for a poor piece of hardware. I unplugged it & threw it away, and have since bought an internal card by another manufacturer. Stay away from this one.