Review: Pinnacle PCTV USB Pro

Connection helps TV go live on your PC, in your summer house.

Product name: Pinnacle PCTV USB Pro

Company: Pinnacle Systems

Web site

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Product name: Pinnacle PCTV USB Pro

Company: Pinnacle Systems

Web site

Price: $100

Description: The PCTV Pro USB device is a USB 2.0 TV tuner that connects to an analog TV connection (either cable or antenna). Once connected, the device lets you record TV shows and save them onto the PC's hard drive (the device connects to the PC via USB 2.0 cable). Recordings can be made in MPEG-1, -2, -4 or DivX format, or directly to a DVD if a DVD recorder exists on the computer. Video inputs (composite and S-video) and an audio input (stereo cable) let you connect a camcorder or VCR and record from those devices to the PC. The device includes a remote control (for changing channels and accessing the electronic program guide through the TitanTV Web site), and bundled software includes a media manager and Pinnacle's Studio QuickStart video-editing software.

Why it's a Toy of Summer: A bit of a stretch, but the device does come in handy if you want to record shows from the hotel room or summer house. The video inputs can also come in handy if you want to take some camcorder content and transfer them to a PC for editing (though that would seem like work, not something necessarily you'd want to do on vacation).

Quick Review: Installation is pretty easy. Just take a cable line and connect it to the Pinnacle device and then attach via USB cable to your computer. After installing the software, you should be up and running and able to watch TV on your PC, or record shows.

Using the system requires a lot of memory and a good processor. On our test notebook, the Pinnacle system slowed the computer a lot, and we got latency in changing channels or switching screens on the system. We didn't have a DVD recorder, so we were unable to transfer recorded shows to DVD. Also, recording shows takes up a lot of memory on the hard drive, which fills up quickly if you want to record a lot.

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