Record TV Programs on Your PC

Pinnacle PCTV Plus is a TV Tuner with advanced features that make it stand apart in the market. Installing the card is simple. It fits into a free PCI slot on your machine. Plug the TV Cable into the port at the back and use the supplied audio cable to connect the Audio Out of the card to the Line-In port of your sound card so that you can watch TV with sound.

The card also comes with a remote with many features, and a remote IR port. This IR port needs to be connected to a serial (COM) port and the IR receiver itself placed somewhere near the monitor so that you can control the TV from a distance.

This IR thing is one grievance I have against the product. The port should either go into the TV card itself (the card currently has no port for connecting the receiver) or use USB. Most computers have only 2 COM ports and these are mostly used for the mouse, modem or Palm cradle or some such item.

Once the hardware is installed, boot up your machine. Drivers and installation instructions are provided with the product and it installs easily. Install the Pinnacle PCTV Software and you are ready to go.

The first time you run the program, it asks you if you wish to scan for channels. Proceed with it and you’ll quickly see channels to start appearing as the software probes the cable for different frequencies. At the end of the scan you’ll be presented with a list of channels to use.

You can use the mouse or the keyboard to browse the channels and control the volume. You can also fine tune the channels using the settings screen. You can rename, tune, and change the order of the channels as you wish.

One of the features suited for channel browsers like me is the “Channel Surf” button. This allows you to quickly see a snapshot of all the programs running currently in a grid. This grid keeps updating continuously with the latest channel information. When you see a particular program you’d like to see, simply click on it to move it into the main window and see.

The window allows many other features. You can resize it, change it to full screen and back, and even zoom in to any part of the picture. For watching the TV in full screen mode you should have a good video card and the latest version of DirectX installed.

The feature that really sets the Pinnacle PCTV Plus apart is the ability to record TV programs and save them. You can select the kind of output you want: VCD (MPEG1), DVD (MPEG2) or Divx (you need the codec installed). Divx of course produces the smallest size–about 15MB per minute of video. You can even directly write a VCD of the program to a CD-R if you have a CD-R/RW drive on your system!

The PCTV Plus is a great piece of hardware. It does have its quirks sometimes though. The need of a serial port for the IR receiver apart, another thing that I noticed was that many times, the audio and the video were not completely in sync.

The Pinnacle was also unable to catch all the channels that my real TV could. Even with manual fine-tuning I was unable to find the missing channels. I tried to tune the Hallmark channel to record one of my favorite TV shows–Star Trek: Voyager.

The channel comes up perfectly on my TV, but no amount of tuning found it on the PCTV Plus! My cable operator does not have control over the channel frequency so was unable to switch this with another one that I get.

So if you have a channel that you watch frequently and might like to record off it occasionally, see if you can get a test piece from your dealer and check out whether that channel comes on it. You could also ask your cable operator to move the channel into a more popular frequency. But in case that is not possible, you may be stuck without being able to see what you



want to.

The Bottom Line: The PCTV Plus is a great piece of equipment to own. Instead of buying a second TV, you can spend 50% less and get much better features. The always-on-top feature lets you watch TV at the same time as you work.

Vinod Unny is a Technology Consultant at Enterprise InfoTech