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

This product is really just a game. A teeze all the way. It will never work. All of the answers to the game are on the Adaptec Support site if you can find them.....the game you know....the game.

I bought the PAL version from Amazon UK some time back and thought it was a good product initially. subsequently i realised adaptec released this product just to show there presence in A/V market as the support for this product is pathetic, price in unreasonable and most of all apart from bundled crappy software no third party software vendors support it. you cannot even upgrade the bundled windvr to the new retail version. I use to think adaptec products are good but not anymore. so buyers beware of this.

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.

For reference, this product is only different from Videoh!DVD by the presense of TV Tuner, the rest is identical (and seems to be identical on the hardware level). So it's all applicable to that product too.

I really did not got so far as to try the TV tuner, I was completely set off by this product when trying video capture. My computer is three times faster and has four times more memory than the minimum declared as necessary for this product, and, of course, I use USB 2.0, and still less than a minute of capturing video with minimal settings resulted in blinking orange LED meaning ERROR. In fact, I even did not had to capture video, just gettign to capture screen without actual capturing (no copying to disk) resulted in the same problem.

As I understand from my observations, this piece of hardware just was not able to really encode video stream in real time. Granted, I used somewhat noisy tape which is a challenge for compressing/encoding, but is not that what you'd like to have video capture for -- to archive old family videos?

And for TV, well, may be you will have some functionality, but with getting accustomed with it and usingwidely, you'll quickly get the same level of frustration, that I had. Don't waste your money on this junk.

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.