Pinnacle PCTV Pro - Opinions?

[darrylstott]

Hi,

Has anyone used a Pinnacle PCTV Pro capture card? I've read mixed reviews so i'm looking for personal opinions.

Thanks,

Darryl

[gIzzE]

one of the best cards with out spending a few hundred is the Parkard Bell TV-100 card.

it is ?29.99 ay pc world and is pretty impressive. Alot of the home cinema pc boys use it to capture sky and scale it to show on projectors.
It has a very good philips decoder on it that is normally forn on the cards costing 10x that amount.

[mid]

gIzzE - what inputs does that thing have, by the way? I'm trying to find something that will take RGB (ideally scart, so I don't need to do fancy wiring) - most of them only do composite, or at best s-video. All the scaling and deinterlacing in the world is a bit pointless if you've not got decent colour seperation to start with.

[Saurian]

I'm using one of these aswell - love it.

It's got either composite or SVideo input.

[gIzzE]

Saurian I hope you're using Dscaler to grab the image

probably the finest piece of free software there is.

http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/index.php

Mid there are a couple on avforums classifieds at the mo that have component, and the JS RGB to component converter does a stunning job converting in fact the colours look better coming out of that than they do stright out of a pioneer 757i that we tried the other night, which has got ot say somthing for it. it is around ?150ish though.

[darrylstott]

I've just seen a Hauppauge PVR-250 which has an onboard mpeg encoder, anyone used that?

[gIzzE]

what is it that you want to do with it exactly ???

if it is for grabbing s-video from a console then the Packard Bell TV-100 combined with Dscaler cant be bettered without spending around $500.

it really is a no brainer mate.

this pic was taken using a pioneer 737 dvd player via s video into the PB TV-100 card and projected onto an 84" 16:9 screen.





the card is awesome regardless of price.

[darrylstott]

How is the sound on it though? i only have my onboard sound so would i need to get a soundcard? why is such a cheap card supposedly so good?

Also, can anyone find any reviews of it online?

I want to use it for capturing tv mainly in SVCD quality.

[gIzzE]

search on www.avforums.com and read up on it, there are pages of info regarding it mate

[darrylstott]

search on www.avforums.com and read up on it, there are pages of info regarding it mate

All i found was a guide full of jargon about Dscaler.Does anyone have a small video/audio sample from the TV-100?

[andy572]

It's recommended, Daryl, because of the Philips chip that's used on the card. From what I've read (and hope to be true), it can provide bold colours, full TV-resolution and noise-free images.

Incidentally, I believe the flyvideo 2000 and flyvideo 3000 use the same hardware and sell at about the same price. Look for SAA713x e.g. SAA7130, SAA7134..., to ensure that you get the right hardware.

It's been a while since I looked into this, but I hope that helps.

P.S. I think there's quite a few branded and 'no name' cards out there that use the same chipset, so a 'SAA713x' search should prove useful...

[darrylstott]

But can this card manage SVCD? i relly need a quick response as i'm going for on in less than an hour.