TV TUNER CARD: Pinnacle PCTV Pro

This TV tuner card is for those who want to do more than just watch TV on their PC. The TV tuner is fast and efficient, and the picture quality is also excellent. Channels can be fine tuned manually, renamed and arranged in the order you want. It also has an excellent ‘channel surf’ feature, which arranges all channels in a tiled view. Just click the tile you want and the corresponding channel will open up. The card’s remote is rugged and has many features, letting you perform all the functions of Pinnacle Vision. The remote receiver plugs into a vacant serial port on your machine, though it would’ve been better if it was USB. It comes with the software, Pinnacle Vision, which is very easy to use and has many features. 

You can record a program in MPEG 1 or 2 and make it suitable for creating a VCD, SVCD, DVD low resolution, or DVD. Custom compression levels can also be defined. Audio from programs or the radio can also be recorded in either WAV, WMA or MPEG Audio formats. Pinnacle Vision let’s you directly burn your programs to a CD, without any additional CD-burning software. The video recording happens smoothly without any frame drops, and you can even schedule it to happen automatically, to record your favorite programs in your absence. The card has S-Video and composite inputs to capture from other video sources. A time shift feature let’s you buffer programs you watch, which then permits you to pause a TV program you’re watching, rewind it, and chop out unwanted content such as ads, etc. The card has an FM radio stereo, which works fine and automatically scans all the FM stations, and even a few junk channels, which have to be removed manually. 

The card also has a software called Pinnacle Trex to convert the different multimedia file formats. A trial version of Pinnacle Studio 7 video editing program is also thrown in. At around Rs 4K, the card is value for money.

Siddharth Sharma