If you use a Home Theater PC, then you’re no doubt familiar with the many PVR and HDTV cards available. Although Windows Media Center supports 2 PVR cards plus an over-the-air HDTV card, it would be nice if there were a single card that integrated all of these technologies into a single card.
Pinnacle has introduced their PCTV HD video capture card for the PC that not only integrates standard-definition decoding and FM radio, but OTA (over-the-air) HD receiption, in addition to QAM (unencrypted HDTV over cable). Pinnacle also claims full Media Center compliance for Windows XP and Vista. These features on a single card will certainly pique the interests of any home theater enthusiast, who have been looking for such a card for years.
Enjoy live HD or SD TV on your PC
- 3-in-1 TV tuner card for digital TV (ATSC), analog TV (NTSC) and FM radio
- Watch SD and free HDTV on your PC – no service fees
- Includes remote control and FM radio antenna
- Hardware ready for ClearQAM (unencrypted digital cable) reception
- Automatically record shows to your hard drive in the destination file format of choice (i.e. MPEG-2, DivX, etc.) or even direct-to-DVD
- Capture from your cable/satellite set-top box or camcorder with the included A/V adapter cable
- Turns your PC into a personal video recorder (PVR) with time-shifting: pause, rewind TV
- Trim your videos with Pinnacle Studio QuickStart
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.
- 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.
This is a brand-new card with brand-new technology and supports the brand-new Vista operating system, so I slapped it in our [OC]ModBox with the following specifications:
- Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo Processor
- Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard
- nVidia 8800GTS 320MB PCIe video card
- Creative X-Fi Platinum
- 4GB A-Data DDR2-800
- 2x 500GB Western Digital SATA2 HDD
- Vista Ultimate x64
Driver and software installation went rather smoothly, and after a restart we were able to test it out. I ran setup and the Pinnacle installation wizard recognized Vista x64 and installed the appropriate drivers. On the driver CD is an application for Media Center to recognize the new card, but this application did not work on Vista x64. Media Center did recognize the card, anyway, but had very limited support. The FM tuner could not be found. The HDTV and SDTV tuner did work, however, but standard definition could not be detected while HDTV was operational.
One thing that was rather disturbing was the processor usage this card requires when recording a program. Recording a standard-definition TV show required nearly 40% of my processor’s resources, much less trying to watch a show at the same time. Playback resources can be reduced by using the PureVideo support built into the 8800GTS video card, but not every application uses it.
Recording an HDTV stream used only 10% resources, but really should have been lower because the card is simply dumping the stream to hard disk and shouldn’t really use any PC resources. Playback of live HDTV used about 30% CPU, as the card is streaming HD in real time, which the PC then decodes while watching. The CPU usage of watching a show isn’t indicative of the card’s performance. While the extra resources weren’t taxing the E6600, Media Center’s menus were slightly more sluggish, which reduces the “appliance-like” factor of a Home Theater PC.
Processor usage of a “real” PVR card with hardware MPEG encoding literally uses only 1-2% of a CPU, even under full load, so I was surprised by these results. It was obvious that x64 support was not polished up, so I tested the card in a more modest HTPC destination with the following specs:
- AMD Athlon 64 3000+
- Chaintech nForce4 motherboard
- Sapphire X1600 PCIe video card
- 2GB Geil DDR-400 memory
- Soundblaster Audigy 2
- 2x 250GB Seagate SATA2 HDD
- Windows XP Media Center Edition (32-bit)
Driver installation went just as smooth, and after a reboot we began testing on Media Center. We were able to successfully install the Media Center support appliation and enter Media Center. Recording a show stopped the HTPC in its tracks. We were eventually able to get Task Manager open and see that 98% of the processor was in use by ehencode, which is what Media Center uses when recording a show.
Obviously this card does not support hardware MPEG encoding at all. Even though this PC isn’t as powerful as a new machine, it is still more than adequate to record several shows at once, and watch high-definition content. Recording a show with our Hauppauge video encoder utilizes about 2% CPU usage, and watching a standard definition show requires about 30% of the processor’s attention.
Again, recording a HDTV stream isn’t as resource intensive, as the stream is already compressed. A powerful processor is only required when trying to play back the HDTV stream. Recording OTA HDTV used about 20% of the CPU, which is perfectly acceptable.
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.
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3 Comment
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?