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| Pinnacle PCTV HD Card 800i Review |
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Page 4 of 6 Installation Along with our enigmatic referral to "ClearQAM" support, we'd like to draw your attention to the "Certified For Windows Vista" logo in the lower right corner. Though the issues we encountered seemed to also occur under certain XP installations, according to our visits to Pinnacle's own support forums , it is quite clear alot of Vista users have had problems with installation similar to what we encountered. In our case we installed the card in the following machine
Inasfar as television sources, we used both our local Charter Communications cable service, and an ATSC antenna. Everything went fine upon restart. We followed the Quick Start's recommendation to abort Microsoft's driver installation wizard, and proceeded to run the installation setup from the provided Pinnacle PCTV Installation CD. Towards the end of the driver installation section of the install however we experienced an utter hard lock of the system, which required a forced reboot. Upon rebooting however, the drivers were detected and installed. We encountered this behavior every single time we attempted to install the TVCenter Pro suite whether it was the CD install, or the beta 4.94 suite from Pinnacle's website. To see if it was a motherboard or OS quirk, we threw the card in an ancient MSI KT6V VIA KT600 box running Vista, and encountered similar behavior. Doing so under the MSI system's XP dual boot however did not experience this hard lockup. After installation seemed to have recovered itself we encountered our next problem. Attempting to launch the TV Center Pro application resulted in "PMCLoader.exe has stopped working" errors. Upon visiting Pinnacle's support website looking for a workaround, we were instructed to simply uninstall the application, run their "RegDelete" tool which is supposed to clear Pinnacle registry entries, and reinstall. This simply did not work for us. Indeed on further examination Pinnacle's "RegDelete" tool didn't seem to be removing enough of Pinnacle's leftover registry detritus to do much good. We worked out our own method for getting the card to work, albeit a rather ridiculous and painful one.
We encountered the same problems when we did a parallel clean Vista install on an Hitachi 160GB drive, but only if we tried to install the CD distributed software suite. If we started clean with just the 4.94b beta suite, all we had to do was force a reboot. Whew! Now that we've suffered through getting the TVCenter Pro software to work, we moved on to Windows Media Center. Installation of the MCE support included on the install CD was short and sweet, though not without it's own share of drama. Analog QAM cable worked just fine in MCE, with channel scanning and audio quality on par with our experience with TVCenter Pro 4.94b. ATSC tuning however was problematic. We were able to tune several local channels that broadcast in high definition already, but each channel had varying degrees of audio lag which seemed to stem from some sort of sync issue between the two streams. We could mitigate or even get lucky enough and eliminate the audio lag by randomly switching channels for a bit, but one would hardly call this a solution. Unlike some tuner manufacturers who have "wedged" support for ClearQAM HD cable into MCE, Pinnacle has made no effort to do so as of yet. Considering that ATSC tuning is still a bit of a train wreck in Media Center, we can see why. There we go mentioning ClearQAM again. Well, we suspect it's time to move on to TVCenter Pro, and discover why we keep going back to that statement. |
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