STUDIO PCTV CARD

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HEy!!!!

does anybody else in the world have a pinnacle system studio pctv video card, and you use it to capture video, please please please help!!!!!!!

my card doesn't record properly, and i just need to know if anyone else has got the card, and if they have the same problem?????

please reply here, just to say if your card records ok or not....

thanks...

-- andy hubbard (killpop_2000@yahoo.com), November 09, 2000

Answers

Yikes, you might want to check Pinnacle's PCTV discussion board at http://webboard.pinnaclesys.com/read_forums.asp? WebboardID=1&SectionID=13&lng=1

One look at the problems reported, along with the horrible reviews of this product at CNET made me stay away from this dog long ago.

If you just got this product, you might consider getting a refund as it appears that most people have big-time trouble with this product.

Kevin

-- kevin (kevin@kevcat.com), November 09, 2000.


I bought this card to replace my iomega buz when there was a rebate on the card. It made my buz look like the best card. Neither could I get the card to function well and the compression using software caused severe frame drops. I also had trouble with the ATI tuner card and I stay with my buz which works very well.

I would suggest getting a capture card with hardware compression so that you off load your processor and capture well - use your VCR as a tuner. If you want to go for an inexpensive analog card the DC 10+ is a good choice for $99. Please note that all of these capture cards are finicky and need a carefully tuned system even the most expensive cards have problems with system incapatibilities.

-- klebsiella (kliebsiella@visto.com), November 09, 2000.


I use Broadway Pro 4.5 and was impressed with how it worked perfectly out of the box on day one. Solid software and hardware. I previously had a Matrox Rainbow Runner Studio. Now that thing is BIG TIME finicky and buggy as hell. Took a lot of fine tuning to get it to work properly. Glad to have that thing collecting dust in a drawer along with my old Matrox Millenium II video card. But hey, it was cheap. If you can afford it, I'd recommend the BWay Pro with the only (big) caveat that it only captures at 352x240.

Kevin

-- kevin (kevin@kevcat.com), November 10, 2000.


studio PCTV is very good for its cost, you may be able to grab video at 384x288 non-interlaced and 640-480 interlaced on Pentium III/Duron? Athlon systems. But is any trick to make it better? New drivers? Ivan

-- (kokpit@ptt.yu), November 21, 2000.

Hi !! I have one of these cards (I bought it about an yea back) and I tried capturing video with it. It always resulted in horrible results with loads of frames dropping off. Probably because it records video in avi format which requires large video files.

Last week, I read about some software based MPEG encoders and downloaded one called WINVCR. Installed it and tried recording at MPEG1 format with video codec as YUV9. I was surprised to find that I was able to record MPEG1 video from this card without any problems. This is because mpeg files require much smaller hard disk space (this much less disk I/O, which speeds up things). One important thing required for this kind of thing is a powerfull processor (note that I have a Pentium-III 450 Mhz).

I have since then tried to record more MPEG1 video and there seems to be no problems at all.

Give it a try and see !!

Ravi M.

-- Ravi Mohta (rmohta@hotmail.com), December 28, 2000.



I have a PCTV Pro card in my computer, I have had this for many years now. Always had problems with the pic/sound sync. But thanks to the InterVideo WinDVR software I bought a week ago, it is now working PERFECTLY. I am able to capture any kind of MPEG1 AND MPEG2 with it, and the sync is perfect now. Even with the highest quality MPEG2 it is very nice. The WinDVR is incredibly easy to deal with, and also - capturing directly to MPEG I can use my CD-writer on these files without having to convert them after I finish capturing. So this WinVDR piece of software is totally worth itīs money (actually very cheap). Anybody out there having problems with their PCTV-card, go to InterVideo web and download a trial version of WinVDR and test it.

-- Baldyman (baldyman@portalen.no), September 24, 2002.

I am capturing TV with the PCTV card at DVD Quality (6MB/sec) and burning it to DVD with a Sony Burner. Have NO problems with it and the quality is perfect. you must have lots of grunt in your system!! I am using a P4 2.4 with 1Gig of Ram, the secret seems to be in the big Ram. had lots of sync problems before I doubled the Ram from 512. only problem I have that the filesize limits at 4Gig hope this helps!

-- John F. (hannaone@mcmedia.com.au), August 18, 2003.

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