The PCTV HD PCI card comes in a standard blister pack that must be opened with scissors. Inside the clear plastic packaging is the HDTV tuner card itself, mini remote, remote control receiver cable, FM radio antenna, A/V adapter cable, quick-start guide, and two CD-ROMs with drivers and software.
The card itself is a wonder to behold if you’ve ever seen previous TV tuner cards. Previous board layouts are full-height and usually dominated by a large silver analog cable or HDTV decoder box (which tend to get rather warm). Previous cards also have tons of electrical components to support the many chips, as well. Pinnacle has developed a new board design that shrinks the signal encoder down to a small ingot, and uses a Connexant Broadcast Decoder chip, and only a handful of supporting electronics. Because of the reduced board clutter, this board is half-height.
The card is PCI-based, but with all this new technology being implemented, why not use PCI-express? Nearly every recent motherboard includes many PCI-e 1x slots that go unused because vendors are still producing new boards based on the classic PCI bus. The board will perform just fine with this ancient bus, but many technology enthusiasts have newer motherboards, meaning that there are only two or three classic PCI slots available; which are probably taken up by a soundcard, PhysX board, Killer NIC, and other crap that should have been designed with a PCI-e interface.
The main chip on this card is Conexant’s CX23880-3 Broadcast Decoder chip, which can decode HDTV and SDTV into recordable digital signals. The single-chip solution enables the host PC to perform audio and video capture through hardware or software codecs. The chip features:
- Worldwide Standards Video Decoder (NTSC/PAL/SECAM)
- EIA-J/A2/NICAM/FM Broadcast Stereo and Mono Decoders
- 10-bit Video ADCs (analog to digital converter)
- Serial and Parallel MPEG input ports
- Digital Audio (I2S) Input and Output ports
- Stereo Line Output DACs (2 DACs)
- VIP pixel port
The whitepaper on the CX23880-3 states that it supports hardware encoding, but does not specify if this chip actually does any encoding itself, or if that support has to be implemented on another chip.
The remote control is the same as used in Pinnacle’s HDTV Pro USB stick. It uses 2 AA batteries but has no lights to indicate it is working. The remote did not work in Media Center, but the driver CD did include software that test the remote control. The software did recognize the remote and which channel it was on, and the remote did work with Pinnacle’s own software.
3 comments
the remote that came with my card does not work
I've tested several video capture cards, and those that natively use MPEG aren't as sharp. I've gotten really sharp results just by using VIVO on a regular video card and capturing in MJPEG, but it really doesn't matter because it eventually gets compressed into MPEG2 or H.264 anyway.
I want to ask if this card does better than the ATI AIW that I have. When I look at HD on either my monitor, which has great resolution, or my HDTV, the signal from the AIW is not sharp at all.
Is the Pinnacle's picture sharp and clear?
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