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Review of Pinnacle PCTV Rave for use as an analogue capture cardI decided to look for the cheapest solution for analogue capture since my Pinnacle DC10+ card had just failed. In this review I am only looking at the card's analogue capture capabilities and not its TV features. I purchased the retail product available in the UK so some of this article may not apply to other countries. Since this card is aimed at the average consumer I have assumed that the purchaser does not have broadband Internet access. Contents of the Box:
Installation:The card installation is straightforward if you are familiar with installing PCI cards. The drivers and software installation is simple and includes a handy "assistant" which tests that the card is functioning correctly. I didn't install the Pinnacle Studio 7 trial software as I already have the full version. The PC I used is based on an Abit NF7-S NForce2 motherboard with an Athlon XP2000+ processor and has a recent installation of Windows 2000 with SP3. Contents of the CD-ROM:
Pinnacle PCTV Vision SoftwareThe bundled software for video capture/TV viewing is called PCTV Vision. It consists of a simple window with video preview and some VCR like controls at the bottom of the window. It has a few configuration options for video capture and you can vary things such as colour, audio, and interlacing. When capturing the gallery window normally appears next to the Vision window and shows thumbnails of the captured clips. PCTV Vision Window
and the gallery …
My first impressions on this card and software combination is that, for video capture, it is severely limited since you can only capture in either MPEG 1 or miro XL codecs and only at 352 X 288 resolution (PAL). All other options are greyed out on the window (see below) and appear only to be available on other products. This seems to be in direct contraction to the readme file on the CD-ROM that states that it supports the following resolutions: · 192 x 144 Settings from PCTV Vision Application:
(Note the VCD, SVCD, DVD, and Custom options are all greyed out) I captured a short video clip of my Hi8 camcorder and the capture appeared to work but there is no indication of dropped frames. However there appears to be a serious bug in the software - when I double-clicked on the clip thumbnail to view the clip the application hung. It cannot be stopped using the Windows 2000 Task Manager and even prevents the PC being shut down. In the end I had to hit the reset button. A similar problem occurs if I click the record button more than once. I did try uninstalling all video software and run Pinnacle's registry cleaner application. However on reinstallation of the software the bug remains. On reboot the captured video segment is readable by Windows Media Player but at 352 x 288 it is noticeably degraded from the original quality because of the low resolution. Pinnacle PCTV rave does include a trial version of Pinnacle Studio 7, an editing package, but this software is very limited in that it cannot capture, has restricted editing features and can only output at 160 x 120 resolution. I then tried to capture with the full copy of Pinnacle Studio 7
and I get a greater choice of codecs but the only resolutions I
can capture at is 176 x 120, 240 x 180, or 320 x 240. (Please note
that the supplied trial copy of Studio 7 cannot capture). Codecs available from Studio 7: Webtext:From the manual the web text application seems to be a way of displaying teletext information as a web page. However when I tried to run the Webtext application to see what it is like but it failed to attach to its own local web server. However this problem may be due to the fact I have no TV antenna attached. The web server caused it own problems. With the web server running my mail client (Eudora Pro) would not get past its splash screen. Software Updates:I looked at Pinnacle's web site for software updates and I must admit I was very confused with their card drivers and versioning. On the web page it states that the driver (version 4.02a) is only for windows XP. However the hyperlinks for all operating systems point to the same file. Also the driver on the CD-ROM is labelled as version 1.0.2.7 but these are dated after the drivers from the web page. In addition the download for this is over 27 MB and is really too big to download without broadband Internet access. Hyperlinks for Windows 95 and NT4 are also included (which is strange since elsewhere it says that these operating systems are not supported). You can also download Vision version 5.5 upgrade (with drivers) from the web site. However, at over 55 MB, it is impractical to download unless you have broadband Internet access. Uninstallation:The uninstallation runs smoothly but does not delete all installed files and clear all applicable registry entries. Alternatives:Since this board is based on the Conexant/Brooktree BT878A chip you can get a public domain driver for this card that should enable you to capture at higher resolutions. See BT8xx WDM video acquisition driver for more details. This could be used in conjunction with another Public Domain application VirtualDub to provide video capture. Both these software packages can be downloaded free from their respective web sites. Unfortunately I was unable to get any audio captured my PC but, by then, I had run out of time and did not persevere with this. You may have more success with this than me. Conclusions:This is a very cheap card but you get what you pay for. The whole package is not professionally put together, the software is too limited and is buggy for video capture. I haven't tried the TV capabilities - maybe it does this adequately but as an analogue capture card it falls short. I have returned the card to the shop. Now what shall I buy instead? ....... |
