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December 5, 2006
HD over-the-air
I bought the Pinnacle USB HD tuner stick and played around with it over the weekend. Friends in Europe have been using this type of device for some years now on their laptops since space is limited and stations have been transmitting DVB-T for yonks. However, I never saw much use of one here...
On the positive side, there are way more HD channels broadcasting over the air than I thought these days. It was a welcome surprise to see so many channles (about 30) available over-the-air in digital format. In particular, PBS has multiplexed five channels over their allotted frequency...this is very nice as there is an all-day kids channel and an all-day World news channel (BBC and the like). In addition, Univision which transmits from Vallejo (can barely see anything on analog) comes in nice and clear ...so I can watch Mexican soccer (though Cruz Azul, my favorite team, was eliminated over Thanksgiving weekend)
Otherwise, the product pretty much sucks...The software crashes quite often and takes about 30-45 seconds to initialize (not like a TV). Performance is also an issue. The channels very often drop frames and get all blocky. Strangely, the software default was to NOT use hardware acceleration. I turned it on but I couldn't really see much improvement. The software that interfaces to the device has an incredibly lame UI. Here are some examples:
The list of recordings only shows the first letter of the day of the week so Saturday is indistinguishable from Sunday. The columns for each field can't be changes..It also doesn't grab the important metadata such as Title and add to the list!
another example is the calendar...for some reason, it only shows six days of the week!! Saturday is missing in the UI and I can't make the window bigger
The device crashed after the first scheduled recording (I set it to record 4 football games over the weekend) and I came back to find it couldn't find the hardware after the first recording). The default settings of the software are to have the recordings to be at the highest quality. Although this is seemingly good, a recording of a football game (3 and 1/2 hours) ended up being 25GB!!! So, I ran out of free space on my laptop. I didn't realize this till Sunday. I finally changed the default settings and ended up with a football game in 4GB. I have two other files that are 25GB and 18GB that I need to re-compress to a more manageable format (or buy a blu-ray recorder along with stock in hard drive companies!!)
The EPG doesn't let you sort by genre or search so to set up a recording of an event when you don't know the channel (which was my case with the football) is very painful. You have to check each channel individually.
The good news is that it is supported by Media Center but not out of the box. One has to download a different software from the Pinnacle website for this. I just discovered this so might attach the device to the Media Center and play around. The Media Center UI for EPG and recording is quite nice so it may change my view of the product.
Posted by raza at 7:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack