Pinnacle PCTV HD PCI Capture Card

At first the Pinnacle PCTV HD looks like the Holy Grail to Media Center PC users… it incorporates over-the-air HD with standard-definition analog capture, and supports FM radio and QAM cable decoding.  The board design is extremely innovative as Pinnacle has drastically reduced the electronic components required to make it work, and even shrunk the signal decoder box down to a small little nugget.  Other vendors take note: this board design blows away anything else on the market.

Unfortunately the product just doesn’t cut the mustard in a home theater environment.  One must have a beefy processor to even begin recording shows, much less watch live TV or record two shows at the same time.  Even with a fast dual-core processor, the Media Center experience is reduced as menus and other interface items lag while shows record.  The absense of Vista x64 support is surprising, as the product package clearly has “Certified for Windows Vista”… and to my knowledge you can’t say that unless you support both Vista platforms (Microsoft didn’t include both versions in one box just for the fun of it).

As an HDTV capture device the product works as well as any other OTA HDTV card, but if you’re purchasing this card then you’ll want all of its functionality.  There’s just no reason to ever purchase a video capture device for a home theater PC that doesn’t come with hardware MPEG encoding.  The Connexant CX23883 chip supports a hardware encoder, and they aren’t all that expensive anymore.  The omission of this $5 chip changes what would be an otherwise perfect product into one that’s just not worth your money.

	REPORT CARD : Pinnacle PCTV HD PCI Card category rating comments Quality 4 Quality parts and quality chips. Innovation 4 Other vendors should take Pinnacle’s lead, but add hardware encoding support. Performance 1 Works fine when streaming just HD, but no hardware support means your system will be suh-low Installation 2 Pretty straightforward for XP, but crippled x64 support. Value 2 Not worth it for most users, but may fit the bill for some. FINAL VERDICT: 2 out of 5 stars