Pinnacle PCTV HD Card 800i Review - FastSilicon.com

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Pinnacle PCTV HD Card 800i Review

Article Index
Pinnacle PCTV HD Card 800i Review
Specifications
What You Get
Installation
TV Center Pro
Conclusion

Page 5 of 6

TV Center Pro

The first process you're directed through is TV Center Pro's channel scanner. The TV Center Pro suite supports Internet Radio (though there is no setting to decide which particular stream provider you can use, so you're stuck with Pinnacle's choice here), FM Radio, Analog TV, Digital ATSC TV, and ClearQAM HD via cable though this is a beta feature. Why it is a beta feature available only after installing the 4.94b suite from Pinnacle's support website despite saying "Hardware Ready For ClearQAM Digital Cable" on the packaging is a mystery to us. We suspect this is simply a poor attempt at obfuscation. Indeed, the hardware *does* support ClearQAM, but only in a few freeware apps we threw at the card. The problem is Pinnacle's software *not* properly supporting ClearQAM tuning.

After letting the software scan all available media types, which takes a very long time on most tuners, we encountered our first issue with ClearQAM support. Our cable system, like many cable systems, has a collection of digital audio only channels. On our system these are 51 digital audio "stations" occupying channels 90-1 through 90-51. Now, TV Center Pro correctly identified these channels as audio channels and grouped them together in the Radio section along with FM and streaming audio channels. Unfortunately none of these will play audio in TV Center Pro. Moreover, the scanning process incorrectly identified *ALL* of our cable systems scrambled and unscrambled ClearQAM channels as audio channels and placed them in the Radio section as well. We cannot get audio out of these either, and are left scratching our heads over the whole "Hardware Ready For ClearQAM Digital Cable" statement. It cannot be that hard to get ClearQAM support working. Driving this point decidedly home is the fact that *free* applications like GB-PVR and WatchHDTV do allow viewing of ClearQAM broadcasts on this card. But, when people are paying their money to Pinnacle for a Pinnacle product using Pinnacle software, it would be nice if it worked on Pinnacle's own application suite first, or so you would think.

Moving along to regular Analog QAM cable and ATSC "Over The Air" HD, TV Center Pro works and works well. Though, with only one coaxial input your left in an either/or situation deciding whether you want analog standard def cable or the few ATSC HD broadcast channels you can get in your area. The suite provides a years worth of support and use of TitanTV's EPG Electronic Program Guide, though syncing the EPG is a very slow process that often timed out on us during setup.

Using the TV Center Pro interface is relatively straightforward, though we found it odd that the "down arrow" scans up channels and the "up arrow" scans down numerically. The screen briefly displays show Electronic Program Guide information in the lower portion of the window for about 2 seconds. Should you need more information or the ability to schedule a PVR recording you simply click the EPG icon at the upper right to access the Program Guide controls. Recordings are stored as MPEG2-TS transport streams or DIVX streams and should be compatible with most any media player, though you can play them directly from TV Center Pro from the Program Guide section once they are recorded.

Analog QAM cable viewing quality was excellent considering the source material and on par with our experience watching Analog QAM cable on a TV. ATSC "Over The Air" HD support in TV Center Pro is excellent as well, with none of the audio lag experienced in MCE.

Still, the admittedly beta "ClearQAM" support is a train wreck. We were able to get GB-PVR and WatchHDTV , two freeware applications to tune and view the 22 some-odd ClearQAM video channels we have here with Charter cable, but both applications required alot of manual data entry to achieve this, and being freeware applications both were rather buggy, though we could not determine if this was from the applications being flakey, or Pinnacle's capture drivers.

Finally we come to the PCTV HD 800i's included mini-remote. Barely bigger than your thumb, this is an infrared remote designed to work with the cards included IR reciever. To sum things up briefly, the remote control worked well and as advertised when we used a piece of double sided tape to secure the IR reciever's head in a viewable position. Range was very good once we did this, and we encountered no problems using the remote itself. Just keep in mind that the remote only supports TV Center Pro. Windows Media Center and other Windows software will be totally unaware of it.

All in all we have to say, despite a few good things when using the card with analog cable and ATSC broadcasts, our experience with the PCTV HD 800i was not a pleasant one. Let's spell out why as we conclude things.

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