Laptop External USB TV Tuner Review

Well I've been home now for a week with the flu so I figured I'd buy myself a new toy to kill the time. I bought a Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate Stick and I must say I am very impressed with it. It's an external USB device that acts as a TV Tuner to pull TV signals out of the air like the old school rabbit ears. The difference is it pulls both analog (NTSC) and HD signals (ATSC up to 1080i SDTV) and it also acts as a PVR (personal video recorder) so it has an internal flash memory card to store up to ~2 hours of TV. One of the cool things about it is there isn't any software to install, on the device it has flash memory divided into 2 sections - The first section is a storage drive for recorded TV and the second section has all the software required to play/record TV on the laptop.

The package included a mini-remote, A/V adapter cable (S-Video, Component and 3.5mm jack), high-gain antenna with attached magnet, coax input which also takes cable TV input (or VCR), and the software to record in DiVX and MPG 1,2,4 formats. I've been able to rip my personal DVD's into an avi format so I don't have to drag around a bunch of original DVD's which take up a lot of space (a 2 hour DVD rips to about 1gb per movie to a portable quality which is about the same as cable TV). Note - I own these DVD's and I'm not encouraging you to steal movies so lets not go there.

I tested the OTA (over the air) reception and I found a couple cool things. First you have to scan for channels and the cool thing here is you can tell it what to scan for (so if you only want to scan for HD channels you can do so without having to scan for analog as well). I live in a medium sized city and when I tested the OTA reception I was able to pick up around 8 HD local channels (and around 9 analog ones). Now bear in mind that during my tests I simply plugged in the antenna inside my house so no fancy antenna was used. The HD channels I got were of a very high quality and far surpassed my own cable TV signal which is analog (not that surprising but very cool). The analog reception (both OTA and cable TV input) were ok but nothing to write home about, the signal was watchable for the most part but I wouldn't record off an analog signal because the quality hurts my eyes. You can use this device with digital HD cable if it is broadcasted in ClearQAM (unencrypted digital cable).

The next test I did was to open up Windows Media Center(WMC) and tested the TV Tuner in Vista Home Premium. Once again the device installed itself and even fetched the TV guide for the channels that were detected. To further test the device I told it to record a show from the TV Guide in WMC and it did it seamlessly. Very cool!!

Anyway for those that are looking for alternatives to TV OTR I'd say look into these devices. I spent $100.00 on the Tuner and another $20.00 for a 10ft USB extension cable so I can run the antenna to the external of the truck.

If you have any questions about it give me a shout.

-Reby

 

It took some checking and double checking but yes I do get the CW network over the air so you could watch Smallville this way. I get all the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS) plus a few others in HD (Yumm!). Really the main reason I wanted this was so I could check the major networks out on the road and get news/weather to keep in touch with the world. Keep in mind that you will need to be near a decent sized city to pick up these channels so plan accordingly.

The only thing I want to add here is that you will need a decent laptop to render the video/audio in real time. Anyway I'm back off to bed, stupid flu is driving me crazy.

-Reby

 

I almost bought that exact same unit, how's it working out for ya? Do you record any shows with it? If you do how is the MPEG-2 quality and how large is the recording (file) per hour? One of the things I didn't like about it was plugging it directly into the USB port because if you bump it you could break the port (I use a small 6 inch USB cable that came with my Pinnacle to plug mine in, so I cant break the port unless I do something really dumb).

Really the main reason I went with the Pinnacle is because it can record in a DiVX format which is better than MPEG-2 in compression and quality. I can fit around 5-6 movies on one DVD if I rip them and record them on the DVD so that's a huge space saver (and at $6.00-$20.00 per DVD it gets expensive quick if somebody steals them). You can get the Pinnacle for about the same amount of money if you don't get the version with the PVR. I was looking at USB TV tuners last night online at Amazon and they have both the Hauppauge and the Pinnacle for very reasonable prices right now.

-Reby