Home > Consumer Reviews > Pinnacle Bungee DVD - TV tuner / video input adapter - USB - NTSC

I purchased the Bungee DVD unit and returned it about a week later. The unit is supposed to record from your TV or other input (a Tivo, in my case) and convert it to MPG2 format. Despite the slow channel selection and incredibly buggy software, I did manage to get it to record both DVD and SVCD quality MPG2 video to my computer. However, I was unsuccessful in running the DVD burning software they provided, and the MPG encoding was of a very poor quality, even at the highest bitrates. I was then unable to take the Pinnacle format MPG2 and convert it using another program to burn to DVD -- there is something non-standard about their MPG2 format that TMPG and SpruceUp don't like. I tried all of the tricks on the Pinnacle bulletin boards (believe me, I'm not the only one who's had these problems...) to no avail.

I never even bothered with the time-shifting software included with the product -- it has no program guide data and changing channels was unbearably slow. Oh, and I already have a TIVO...I was just using this to archive saved material from the TIVO to DVD.

I have had this device for a few weeks and I am returning it ASAP! I bought it to capture old training videos for work and found that the audio and video are out of synch too many times to make it work messing with. I had such high hopes for this, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is interested in taking videos from VHS to DVD without the use of some video editing software. I spent hours correcting the video and audio synch problems in Premiere!

Pinnacle withdrew this product from the marketplace fairly quickly. Their "support" desk no longer offers support. In fact, they suggest doing a Google search and then they apologize for the "inconvenience." I've had this happen with 2 Pinnacle products now. There will NOT be a 3rd time. There are better products and better companies out there to do business with.

This is so far the best video capture tool I ever used. The hardware is easy to use. The software is user friendly. It supports DVD resolution capturing, a feature now available in most other video capture cards. It also solves the even/odd fields effect pretty well. It allows you to skip ads when watching your favorite programs. Speed is great.

cons: The box doesn't look cute. Capture can only be done using softwares by Pinnacle (because this device doesn't have a wdm driver and cannot be recognized as a video capture device by other softwares). High system requirement. Don't try it on a Pentium III 500MHz machine.

Installation was easy, and so far could capture video without problems.

From VCD - A bit poor, the images were not very sharp to begin with, the captured .mpg came out even more blurry.
From DVD - Decent quality, able to watch it full screen.

TV - Even without antenna/cable it managed to find 1 channel, but it was all noise.