Pinnacle PCTV Hybrid Pro Stick

The Pinnacle PCTV Hybrid Pro Stick is a TV tuner with a difference. Along with analog TV (your regular cable TV) you can watch and record Digital Terrestrial TV on your laptop or computer. DVB-T is the standard used and it stands for Digital Video Broadcast- Terrestrial. The DVB-T system transmits compressed audio/video stream using coding methods like MPEG-2 and more recently H.264. India has adopted the DVB-T standard and you can tune into 5 channels from Doordarshan. The channels are DD1, DD2, DD Sports, DD Bharti and DD Sahyadri. Currently DVB-T is only available in the four metro cities—Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. There’s also some interesting news on the DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast- Handheld) front, its hand-held counterpart. Nokia has partnered with Doordarshan for a pilot project to test out the DVB-H technology. Using this we will be able to receive TV on our mobile phones.

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**Design, Installation and Features
**The Hybrid Pro Stick is just a little larger than a normal sized pen drive and hence is very portable. Installation is very simple. Just plug the stick into a USB 2.0 port, pop in the software disc and follow instructions. In fact the whole installation procedure is very intuitive. At the time of scanning for channels it gives you the options to scan for analog TV, Digital TV and Internet Radio. For digital TV you will have to connect the supplied antenna to the Pro stick. Anyway you can always come back and access the wizard or the media center settings for whichever broadcast you want to tune into, which by the way is just a one-time process. In fact it’s exactly the same way you tune into channels on your television.

**Tuner, Remote, Antenna for DVB-T, Media Center and Studio QuickStart (for Video Editing) software discs
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Among the features is Time Shifting. Time shifting is what people or rather the manufacturers popularly refer to as pausing live television. Using this feature you can pause a TV channel and resume it at a later instance. What happens basically is that from the time you have paused the TV, the live feed is actually getting stored on your hard drive. The media center lets you configure the space you allocate for recording the live feed, which in fact, is an essential feature. Video takes up a lot of hard drive space and you cannot infinitely let the live TV content be recorded. You can time shift for a maximum of 122 minutes with the maximum file size of 3221MB, that’s approximately 3GB. The time shift feature works for both analog and digital terrestrial TV. Other features include direct-to DVD and hard drive recording. As simple as it sounds, you can record TV on the hard drive or in case you plan to burn your recording, you can directly record it onto a DVD.

This is where the ability to record directly to DivX format comes handy, wherein you can pack in the same information in much lesser space. You can also directly capture in formats supported by the Apple iPod and the Sony PSP. Along with the disc that has the media center software and the device drivers, Pinnacle bundles the Studio QuickStart disc. Using this software you can edit the videos that you record. For example you can use it to remove the commercials in a TV program.

You also have a remote at you disposal, which is very much functional.
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Performance
The image quality of analog TV is average. There were many channels, that were grainy or having snow. The image quality also depends on the quality of the input signal, which in this case is the cable connection. We made sure that the signal quality is good before we proceeded into the review.

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We weren’t able to tune into DVB-T transmissions in the office, so we ventured outside. Once outside we could tune into all the five channels mentioned in our introductory paragraph. The quality of reception was crystal clear. We also spoke to a Doordarshan official and he told us that we could also receive the signals while in motion i.e. while travelling in a vehicle. We tried it in a moving taxi and were disappointed—the output was choppy.
Conclusion

The device costs, Rs. 7,500. Now the only reason we would recommend this device is if you intend on using DVB-T. For analog tuners however you have much better options in other tuners that cost lesser and have much better reception quality. In fact one of the options is from Pinnacle itself- the Pinnacle to Go, which we will be reviewing in a weeks time. So stay tuned for that.