The8thWonder.org

The other day I wooted for Pinnacle PCTV HD card from woot.com for $49.99 + $5 shipping – if you are not familiar with woot.com you can read Woot’ wiki here.

So, what’s Pinnacle PCTV HD card for?

Here are few features:

* Watch SD and free HD TV on your PC
* Listen to FM on your PC
* 3-in-1 tuner card for digital (ATSC), analog (NTSC) and FM radio
* Hardware ready for ClearQAM (unencrypted digital cable) reception
* Automatically record shows to hard drive in formats (DivX, MPEG2 etc)

Actually it has more to it, but mostly I bought it to watch HDTV on my PC and record HDTV programs as Divx so that I could play it on my DVD player.

Here is my PC configuration:

Dual core Intel Pentium CPU 2.8GHz
1 GB Ram
and I have XP Media Center OS

So I got it delivered last week and I decided to install it on my PC on a Friday night.

Installation was straight forward.

Inserted the HD card on an empty PCI slot,

started PC and followed the installation instructions. Voila installation is done and ready to go

Actually it came with 2 CDs. One had Pinnacle TVCenter and the other was Studio Launcer – I believe the later is edit captured/home videos and burn it to DVDs. Honestly I haven’t played much with it yet!

The installed PCTV card had an input for Remote Control Receiver cable, an input for FM cable, an input for antenna and S-Video In.

I decided to try with an external fish bone antenna to get Over-the-air (OTA) HD digital signals – the antenna was hooked in the provided TV antenna input.

I used antennaweb.org to determine where to point my antenna to get better reception. Also, I hooked the provided FM antenna to appropriate slot (FM antenna input).

First time when I started Pinnacle TVCenter Pro, I had to go through the set up process to scan for Radio/Analog/HD TV signals.

After the first scan I was pretty impressed – I got over 13 OTA HD channels

Then I payed a bit with other settings for Audio, Program Guide, Capture and such.

Now the real fun – watch HDTV on PC
It’s A W E S O M E !! – few screen captures below.

KSDK/NBC

KMOV/CBS

KETC/PBS

CW11

PBS – Analog

Turns out this PCTV card is good with OTA HD signals (close to 100% signal strength) but not much with Analog signals – but I didn’t care much for it anyway

I think for about $50+ it is definitely a good deal.

One downside though

I seem to be rebooting my PC more these days after installing HDTV PC card. I need to check on pinnacle’ site to see if they have any patch release that would fix this issue.