Home > Consumer Reviews > Adaptec ADAPTC VIDEOH DVD MEDIA-CENTER 2310 USB KIT ( 2042900 )

I was at a fork in the road between this USB Media Center unit and a similar USB setup by Pinnacle. I did some reading about the product before I purchased and decided on this one for I was concerned about the capture quality. I also was fully aware of some of the bumps in the road experienced with this product, well the software. The InterVideo WinDVR program installed fine and works pretty well. The capture quality is good and variable settings is sufficient for my needs. I like the time shift feature. The Sonic MyDVD program is another issue. When I installed it and went through a routine reboot, I noticed that the two optical drives were not working or acccessible at all. BIOS was registering the drives fine but the Device Manager placed exclaimations next to both drives and also my Iomega ZIP 250MB drive, claiming that there was a definite problem. What one needs to do is follow the instructions to edit the registry files which were defined as "lower filters" for me. That got the optical drives back. I reinstalled the ZIP driver and got that drive back fine. The operation within the MyDVD program is easy to use and never has crashed or locked up on me, same for the WinDVR program. The next problem to arise was the inability to press the burn button (greyed out). One has to go to the Sonic website and download the appropriate Record Engine update. This enabled me to burn my first 1 hour DVD and it was exciting to see it play on a regular player! (took 90 minutes for the burn but that could be my setup). One should note that there's a slight ripple bar that shows up on the bottom of the video upon capture and editing. The finished DVD product however WHEN SHOWN THORUGH A CONVENTIONAL TV will be fine, as the image is cropped in a little bit (completely normal differences between a TV and computer monitor). I should add that I did at one time have a problem with the audio/video sync. I was capturing from a VCR on a tape that had some rough spots on it. This tends to upset things. I happen to have two hard drives on my PC and decided to use the second drive to capture. This does help, and it also helps to have a system that's properly updated, free of ad/spy/virusware etc. My system is about 20 months old, an HP Pavilion 775y with 3.06 HT Pentium 4, 200GB Seagate HDD, and 180 Maxtor HDD, 1GB RAM. Also sometimes it depended on how I started the process of recording a VHS tape. What seems to work for me is to get the tape ready to go in the VCR, press the record button WinDVR wait about 3 secs and then press play on the VCR. I managed to capture my 1 hour show with some rough spots in it with absolutely no sync out problems.
I will decide to give this product a 3 since I had to swim through a lot of technical muck to get it to work beautifully. If you're the type that has used utility programs, updated drivers, installed new equipement, and played mind bending problem solving games like the whole MYST series then this product should be approachable to you. I'm happy now with it.

I regret having this device for video capture purposes. After about 20 minutes, the audio gets out of sync w/ video. Gets worse the longer the capture. I have a new IBM ThinkCenter w/ 512 meg RAM.

Consider yourselves warned.

I had a lot of fun trying the many many features of this great product for a week.

I had to return it though because it simply couldn't lock onto my cable tv channels. Without the TV capabilities, it wasn't worth the price. It worked fine at my parent's house - they have a different cable tv provider.

I'm going to try Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe next - it's not as good but hopefully it will be compatible with my cable tv provider.

The software that is bundled windvr which I found to be full of bugs,
Too bad though because the hardware looks pretty good as far as quality for this device's hardware

When I first tried to capture the audio and video of a VHS
tape I experienced a great deal of radio interference. Upon
advice from Adaptec to use shielded cables with filters and
that solved the problem.
I haveconverted more than 50 VHS tapes to DVD without any
problem whatsoever.
The editing process could be a little less complicated
but beyond that it does exacly what I wanted it to do.

Max E. Grubb