Pinnacle To Go USB TV Tuner

The Pinnacle To Go TV External TV tuner costs Rs. 5,500. While at around Rs. 7,000 you can get a 21-inch television. So why then does it make sense to go in for the Pinnacle TV Tuner? For one, its more suited for people who live in small apartments or for students in dormitories. Those who are are restricted by space and want to use their existing desktop or laptop for watching television have found their answer in the Pinnacle To Go TV External TV tuner. And with it you also have the option to record television.

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The Pinnacle To Go is a USB Analog TV Tuner. It takes in your regular cable TV that comes through a coaxial cable and connects to the computer through a USB 2.0 port. It will not work with USB 1.1 ports since these ports cannot provide enough bandwidth or data transfer speeds for the smooth functioning of the device. The device powers from the USB port itself and doesn’t require an external power source, making the device extremely portable and easy to carry around. Besides the tuner with dimensions of 5.8 x 5.0 x 0.8 inches is roughly the size of a wallet and can be easily tucked into a laptop bag. Let’s have a closer look.

The installation is very simple. Just connect the device to a USB 2.0 port, attach the cable wire, pop in the software disc and follow instructions. The whole process is very intuitive and shouldn’t be difficult to get around with. But let us inform you that Media Center software is heavy on the system and even though they mention a minimum of 256 MB of memory we suggest a minimum of 512MB. Unfortunately this device is only for Windows XP users. The minimum and recommended system requirements for the processor are as follows:

Minimum—Pentium 4 2.0Ghz, Pentium M 1.3 GHz or equivalent AMD Athlon XP Processor.
Recommended—Pentium 4 2.5 GHz, Pentium M 1.5 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 Processor.

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After scanning through channels we straight away moved to the channel with the best reception—CNBC TV-18 (isn’t that obvious! We had earlier tested our cable connection with a television set to make sure our signal is good enough). And boy, were we pleased! The image quality was crisp and clear. Remember the most important feature of a TV Tuner is the quality of its output. Satisfied with that we moved over to its other recording features.
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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. 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.

Among the formats that you can choose to record are MPEG and DivX. 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.

USB and Co-axial Cable Input

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On the front of the device are three input ports, namely — audio-in, S-Video-in, and Composite-in. You can connect the S-Video or Composite output from your Set-Top Box to the S-Video or Composite-in of the Pinnacle To Go, to watch and record television on your computer. This is a very nifty addition because CAS (CAS stand for Conditional Access System) has already been implemented from 1St Jan 2007 onwards. You can also use the S-Video or Composite-In to capture video from your camcorder. And lastly you can also connect your PS2 or Xbox using these inputs. ( If you plan on connecting your new generation gaming console like the Xbox 360 to your PC monitor then we rather recommend using a VGA cable).

Audio-In, S-Video-In, Composite-In and IR Receiver

The Media Center software integrates with www.titantv.com that lets you see programs schedules, schedule recordings and then import settings into the software. Unfortunately it doesn’t apply to India.
You also have the feature to schedule recordings using the Media Center though its a little bit rudimentary.

As far as the remote goes, it operates using IR (Infra Red) and is very functional, letting you control most of the features of it.

Conclusion
It’s a nifty device with very good features although its media center software is a bit heavy on system requirements. The quality of reception is good and the S-Video and Composite input ports come in handy, especially for people with Set-Top boxes who want to watch TV on their laptop or desktop computer. The price tag of Rs. 5,500 seems a bit on the higher side especially when compared to its international pricing but then that holds with most of the computer products. Though this is the price given by the Pinnacle PR Agency and we expect it to be a little lesser in the market. Overall we liked it and recommend it.