Home > Consumer Reviews > Pinnacle PCTV Pro PCI Card/Direct Burn/Remote/Stereo TV/FM Radio

This card promisses some great features, and SOME of them are real !
The software and drivers provided with the card are REALLY BAD. The tuner is very slow, the image quality is far from good, but you can always use 3rd party software in order to get a superior image quality. (I found it very strange, as some of them are FREEWARE !! I would think as natural for Pinnacle to provide better drivers/software). It's a hard work of trial and error to find the correct drivers and software on the web :(
The provided real-time software encoder gives you very poor results on VCD (MPEG-1), and with my Athlon XP 1800 i can forget about capturing at a SVCD resolution (MPEG-2). It's almost unnecessary to say that the DVD encoding resolution is like a dream...that doesn't come true. I loose a lot of frames and i only see the interlaced lines.

I could recommend this card to anyone who wants to have a tiny window to watch the news while doing something important on your computer, but it has a buggy software that has a very strange behaviour like swicthing off the sound, or raising the volume to insane levels just because you touched on something which had nothing to do with it !
I tried more than one unit, and my dealer was kind enough to try it on another computer (Pentium 4, 1 Gb RAM, better power supply, another set-up and location) and he still doesn't know the answers to some common problems.

At this price point, i would try another card and i wouldn't recommend it to myself !

Now I know why I should have bought a video capture card with hardware MPEG2 compression. Even with an overclocked Athlon 1600+ and heaps of memory and fast hard disc, my machine can't keep up with MPEG2 compression at any resolution. MPEG1 is OK but then won't make DVD's. Get problems also with sound and picure getting out of sync. Instructions give no help, they are badly translated and vague. Remote control was useless since it requires a spare serial port which I don't have. A huge dissappointment from start to finish.

I bought a new PCTV Rave card so that I could record my old VHS tapes to DVD. Fitted it up no problem, and I can watch tv fine. The problem is recording. After a few minutes the audio and video are well out of sync! I've tried loads of different software, and it all has the same problem. I've tried emailing pinnacle, but they dont seem to want to know, and judging by the forum it seems to be a common problem. This is the second pinnacle card i've bought ( must be mad ) and this problem always happens.....................
lets just say that for watching tv or video on your pc it's great, but just dont expect to be able to record anything worth watching back.
This is the last time I trust pinnacle..............
(unless anyone has any idea as to how to fix this problem?)

Installing the card couldn’t be made any easier; the software installation was simple to follow. Installing this on a Windows XP Pro machine with a 1G of memory, dual monitors and a 3.06G CPU I found no problems with any of the installation or setup.

One thing to remember is to configure the capture settings to best suites your needs, I was wishing to record to DVD yet found the standard setting would only allow about an hour of recording to fit on one DVD, a quick and simple change of these setting allowed me to get around 1hr 40 mins to 3hours on one DVD and still keep the quality.

The pause TV mode is really cool however it does require lots of power to work well, although saying that I found the TV card only used around 64mb of memory and about 7% of CPU at anytime regardless of recording, watching or pausing so I would think this feature should work on a lower spec machine than mine.

The supplied remote control worked well although as it uses a serial port I’ve had to give it up as I have now used that port for a UPS unit; however I have seen adaptors for other ports so all may not be lost.

As with any graphical product it does require some tweaking to get working well and the quality you require but is worth it in the end.