Pinnaclesystems TV Tuner

[LC1104]

Anyone know how good the Pinnaclesystems TV Tuner is? I can't seem to find the website for it. I don't even know if it's an addon card or a whole video card. i'm hoping that it's an addon card. My plan is to buy a g800 (if it ever comes out) and add a tv tuner of some sort because i there won't be rr-g support. I'm so sad to give up my rr-g but with the lack of support of good drivers for win2k, i'm afraid that's waht it's going to come down to. man... Well, if anyone could give me some info on it, it'd be much appreciated. thanks...

[Michel Carleer]

It is a tuner card. I find it very good indeed.
Pinnacle website is www.pinnaclesys.com (in the US) or www.pinnaclesys.de (Europe).
There is a number of different cards: PCTV PCI(barebone), PCTV Pro PCI(adding stereo and FM radio) and PCTV USB. Oh, and in Europe we also have the PCTV Rave (don't know the difference with the normal PCTV, but the price). But you will see all this on their sites.
If you go for it, avoid the USB version, the USB bus is simply not fast enough. This is true for any tuner card.
Cheers,
Michka


[This message has been edited by Michel Carleer (edited 15 September 2000).]

[LC1104]

Man, thanks so much for such a quick reply. Your message helped a lot. Just one more thing, how about capture quality? THanks a lot.

[jeff b]

Here's the Pinnacle card that I'd like to hear what owners have to say:
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/productpa...Product_ID=104

Jeff B

[Michel Carleer]

Sorry, I forgot to say a word concerning capture. The movie capture quality is very good, but the drivers (Europe, ver 4.02beta) limit the capture size to less than 384x288. but that's just enough if you want to compress to MPEG1 afterwards. For capturing you better use third party programs (Virtualdub, AVI_IO), at least under W2K. OK, some explanation necessary here. The PCTV Pro comes with two programs. First the PCTV Vision which lets you view TV channels or composite/S-Video input. It also allows snapshots or movie capture. But movies are captured using a proprietary compression algorithm and the resulting picture quality is not very good in my view. The second program is called Studio PCTV and allows you to capture, edit and save movies in all formats known to Windows, including MPEG1. The resulting quality is far better. It is a nice piece of program but unfortunately it does not run under W2K.
Add to these two programs a teletext web based application for us europeans and a twain interface to let you capture snapshots from inside your favorite paint editor and that's about it.
The plain PCTV bundle does not include the Studio PCTV, only PCTV Vision.
I am not sure about the use of the PCTV cards under Win ME, I am very happy with my PCTV Pro under W2K.
Hope it helps,
Michka