Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro USB TV Stick Review

Sleek and black, it looks right at home plugged into my MacBook, and with a footprint slightly larger than your average thumb drive, it's incredibly portable. The only downside to the form factor is that it will block the adjacent USB port, which for some laptop users means you'll have to break out the USB hub if you plan on using any other devices while the tuner's plugged in.

The Pinnacle USB Stick isn't much larger than the Cruzer Titanium (2nd Gen.)

The stick will block adjacent USB port, meaning you will have to use the extension cable.

The bundled antenna is also a treat, with a retracted height of about 8" and fully extending to about 26"; it's easy to point around and does a good job of picking up signals without too much hassle, even indoors. The antenna when extended can be angled around 30° before the base will tip.

However, the base is also magnetic, so if it's on a magnetic surface (an apartment windowsill, car door, or edge of a folding table will do) it can be held sturdy. The magnet is quite powerful, actually able to hold the antenna even when positioned upside down or horizontally, so be sure to keep it away from your hard drive and credit cards.

The other other MediaCenter
Going through the PMC setup process is an easy feat, although time consuming due to the number of automatic updates to be downloaded. After Pinnacle MediaCenter has been installed and patched, it will walk you through the process of auto-scanning the available channels, then downloading the associated program guide info.

Once everything's setup, you're greeted with the main window, easy to use if not a little Spartan. At the top there's buttons for switching to TV, internet radio, playback of files and CD/DVDs, and opening up the program guide and scheduler. At the bottom are buttons for changing the channel and volume, as well as standard timeshifting controls. In case you're new to time shifting, this means you can pause, rewind, and fast-forward live television, as well as skip commercials in 30 second intervals as well as do instant replays 10 seconds back.

Other controls exist for viewing the channel information, taking screenshots, selecting the secondary audio programming (SAP) for multi-lingual broadcasts, as well as the usual channel and volume adjustments. Closed captioning is noticeably absent.

The main window supposedly supports automatic aspect ratio adjustment, although it doesn't do a very good job at that, leaving black bars for some SDTV and HDTV broadcasts. Thankfully, this can be worked around by right clicking the screen and manually selecting a ratio. Here it's also possible to change the size manually or by preset, enable "always on top" mode, and change the behavior of the bordering control bars to always-on, auto-hide, or never show.

Rather than utilize FM radio as our European DTV counterparts are capable of, Pinnacle chose to implement Internet radio for our listening pleasure, saving the nuisance of commercials at the expense of being able to listen to music where there is no wireless available. A modest selection of channels is available to choose from, comprised mostly of techno, easy listening, and top 40. (Where's the modern and alt-rock love?) There's no buffering bar to show you if the station is loading or not, but rather if the Windows Media visualizer doesn't show up after a few seconds, assume the channel isn't working. Not surprisingly, time-shifting is absent here.

Changing options within Pinnacle MediaCenter is extremely straightforward, and easy on the eyes thanks to an oversized tabbed menu that has everything in its place. Everything from the onscreen display to automatic updates can be configured here.

Hybrid Performance
Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past 10 years, you should know that NTSC is the analog transmission standard that TVs have been using for as long as I've been around, and ATSC is the new digital standard that does both standard definition and high definition.

Although NTSC still holds it's roots since it's cheaper, works better at long distances (a fuzzy picture is better than no picture), and supports cable television; ATSC is the clear winner when it comes to quality and variety. As someone who's always lately been stuck on NTSC and classic cable, I was thrilled to see a whole new set of channels suddenly available on the digital substations of the various providers. Did you know the LA market has 24/7 music video, weather, news, and anime channels? We also have two nonstop high definition channels from PBS affiliates.

Picture quality on the PCTV HD Pro Stick is absolutely stunning. If you have a decent signal, you have a perfect picture. If you have a low signal, you get no picture, or occasional pixel streaks and audio skips. There is no such thing as wavy lines, white noise or a snowy picture when viewing a digital channel. Take a look at the differences between the NTSC picture and the ATSC picture of the same channel, it's night and day.

For the best picture available, you have to look at the high-definition channels. ABC and Fox both broadcast at 720p (1280x720, progressive), which arguably offers the best picture quality when viewing motion. NBC, CBS, and PBS offer their high definition in 1080i (1920x1080, interlaced) which offers a higher resolution at the expense of quality since you effectively have to blend the interlaced lines together. Watching both on the PCTV HD Pro Stick is a dream, even when watching 1080i since Pinnacle MediaCenter de-interlaces both live and recorded video by default for a smooth picture.

Fast-motion portions of a 1080i signal such as a news or sports ticker also looked reasonably good, slightly blurred but easily legible.

Curiously enough, in fullscreen mode Pinnacle MediaCenter does not take full advantage of the monitor's native resolution. 1080i broadcasts are scaled back 50% to 960x540 then stretched out when they could have just as easily been scaled back 33% to 1280x720 to take full advantage of my widescreen and theoretically be 25% sharper. 720p is also scaled back 50% to 640x360, despite the fact that the entire picture could have easily fit on my 1280x800 monitor. Granted, the picture is already incredibly sharp, but if the technology is there, why not use it?

To minimize the PCTV HD Pro Stick's form factor, save power and lessen costs, all of the encoding is done on your laptop's CPU. As such, it may be difficult for older laptops to transcode outside of native format on the fly, or even decode HDTV. Pinnacle recommends a minimum system requirement of a Pentium 4 @ 2.4GHz or Pentium M @ 1.3GHz with 512MB of RAM, and suggests using a dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM for optimal performance. Simply watching HD takes about 20-36% CPU on my Core Duo 2.0GHz.

From a Distance
Besides software, what sets Pinnacle's PCTV HD Pro Stick apart from the other two ATSC hybrid USB sticks on the market is the inclusion of the remote control. As you might expect, this enables you to change the volume and channel, manually record, and do time shifting. A full set of numbers is also onboard for manually switching to a non-preset channel, as well as a button for switching in and out of windowed mode. As a welcome surprise, pressing the power button will automatically launch PMC into fullscreen mode.

Unfortunately, Pinnacle crippled the possibilities of the remote, actually disabling their 10-foot interface within PMC that's included with other PCTV products. This makes it impossible to switch from TV to Radio and back, as well as view the electronic program guide from a distance. After a couple minutes looking through the program folder and registry I gave up on trying to find out how to enable this locked feature, yet strangely enough, there's not even an upgrade for purchase to enable this functionality.

EPG (Enraging Program Guide)
Breaking away from the free TitanTV service that's used with a handful of other tuners on the market including a few other PCTV products, Pinnacle included a year's free subscription for programming information, stating that additional years *may* require a subscription fee, which SnapStream and TiVo users will already be familiar with. Right now there's no word on Pinnacle's website for how much this service will cost in the future, but unless there's several updates, I can tell you right now it's not worth it.

Why? Well, there are several reasons. First, the data is pulled from German-based epgData.com, which has quite a few missing channels from the lineup even in a market as popular as Los Angeles where I'm testing it. (14 of the 71 channels are missing). Second, practically all of the digital substations (when one channel has more than one broadcast) don't show the correct programming data, only showing the data from primary broadcast. Third, epgData.com doesn't even offer their listings online for you to browse through at work, nor do they offer remote scheduling.

That's not the end of it either. Inside PMC, there is no grid to view multiple time blocks on multiple channels at once, like you'd be accustomed to on a cable box or with the TitanTV service. Rather, you can only view the half-assed data by for all channels, or a specific channel in a single column that's hard on the eyes. Oh, and when you do select a date, you have to keep clicking a slow arrow until you finally get to the right group of hours.

Now to be fair, Pinnacle MediaCenter also supports over-the-air programming data, but the amount of information is also limited and restricted to the same terrible interface. In short, the EPG is so painfully lousy; it's almost sadistic to include it. Pinnacle, how could you?

HD Recording
On the bright side of things, manual recording isn't so bad. If you don't mind looking at a real programming guide and entering time slots manually, you can select the start and stop times, time to record in advance and after the time block, the destination (file or straight to DVD), and the compression settings. You can even pick the frequency of once, daily, weekdays, weekly, monthly, or hourly.

Recording formats include MPEG for DVD and (S)VCD, DivX, native (for digital), and MP4 with profiles for the iPod and PSP. Each has their own set of quality levels. H.264 is listed, but it doesn't work, most likely a leftover from the European DVB products. Recorded shows can be transcoded on the fly straight to your format of choice, although high definition broadcasts will most likely need to be recorded in native format due to the tremendous processing load imposed by HDTV. (Even the 2.0GHz Core Duo T2500 in my MacBook can't handle it).

Recording natively eats up a lot of disk space, "a lot" being an understatement. 480p SDTV broadcasts take up approximately 2.6GB per hour, while 1080i eats 4.8GB per hour and 720p a whopping 5GB. The majority of programming out there is standard definition however, which many recent laptops will actually be able to transcode to DivX on the fly without problems. Be sure your hard drive is defragmented, or you may encounter some hiccups and sync issues in recordings.

Recording to DivX Home Theater (high quality, 720x480) uses 1.8GB per hour, while DivX Portable (medium quality, 352x240) uses only 421MB per hour. Though not perfect quality, DivX Portable is what I'd consider "good enough" for daily recordings since it looks somewhat better than streaming video, and I can't complain with the file size. :)

Post-Production
If you can't transcode on the fly, or if you simply don't want to, it's best to record in the native format and convert later with the bundled Studio 10. Here you can also edit clips, cut out commercials, and make DVDs with menus. It's actually better if you do this than attempt transcoding HD on the fly, as wide-screen broadcasts are transcoded in a 4:3 aspect ratio within PMC, whereas Studio can keep them in their rightful 16:9 format.

Two things to note with Studio v10.7. First, you can't output to high-definition. That's accessible only after a $30 upgrade to Studio Plus. For most users this won't be a necessity, as you can still output to 720x480 or 848x480 (DVD quality).

Second, Pinnacle implemented a useless feature in the more recent builds of Studio that prevents users from dragging HD content to the editing reel prior to converting if their video card doesn't fall within their non-shared 256MB specifications. This restriction is bogus, since the entire load is on the CPU anyway.

Thankfully there's a workaround for this floating on the Pinnacle forums. Just copy and paste (ctrl-c, ctrl-v) the clip into the timeline to bypass the restriction, then transcode to the format of choice. Do know that it's important to have a good quality signal when recording, as there have been a few instances where some video breakup prevents the rest of the file from being converted.

All the aforementioned formats available in PMC can be transcoded to within Studio, as well as DV, MJPEG, Indeo, and any other codecs you have installed on your PC including XviD, with options for custom sizes (under HD), bitrates, and framerates. No options for multi-pass encoding were to be found, although the majority of users aren't going to miss that feature anyway.

Note to Mac Users
While Windows in Bootcamp is nice, OS X is better. Now you can stay booted in OS X and still use the PCTV HD Pro Stick, thanks to the latest version of Elgato's EyeTV (v2.3.2). This means owners of previous EyeTV 2.0 hardware can upgrade to digital for less than the cost of the EyeTV Hybrid, and they get a remote. New users can purchase EyeTV for $80 otherwise. EyeTV uses the TitanTV service and integrates with Front Row, so as you might have expected, I'm actually using the PCTV HD Pro Stick under OS X more than I am in Windows.

Fixes for Choppy Performance
I had a hell of a time with one particularly nasty issue that took me several hours to figure out. To keep things short, know that if you're using battery power, you should disable all power management functionality in your laptop, since video tuners don't take kindly to operating frequency changes.

To do this for your CPU, open the Power Options control panel, and select the "Always On" profile. You should only do this if you're actually experiencing issues or doing recording, as I didn't notice any major issues with CPU scaling.

What took me forever to figure out is that when not plugged into the wall, the auto-hide of the control bars or resizing the PMC window would result in an extremely choppy picture and unsynchronized audio. Eventually I figured out that apparently my Intel 945GM chipset also scales back video performance as well, and does a terrible job at it (if you're looking for it, you can see even the Windows start menu appearing choppy). To solve this, open the Intel GMA Driver for Mobile control panel, select the Display Settings tab, and then click the Power Settings button. Here, drag the power management slider to one notch shy of "Maximum Quality". If that doesn't work, disable the power management entirely.