CRV HD Pro USB Stick - Review
Welcome to PCWizKids Tech Talk. Today I want to show you Pinnacles PC TV HD Pro USB Stick. It’s a TV tuner that you can plug in to your PC and watch free HD channels for example. So I have my laptop here and I just plug in the USB stick into Windows Vista here and it automatically detected it and it’s going to install the drivers.
Now personally the drivers are for 32 bit Windows XP Pro and for the Vista operating systems I'm using the 64 bit and it has Beta drivers for the 64 bit which work fine. So I went ahead and installed the software that came on the CD so I pop it in and up came the auto play to install the TV Center Pro. That’s the software that comes with it and I'll go ahead and install the TV Center Pro that we can watch the TV.
Now like I said they officially have the 32 bit drivers out for Vista and XP and I'm using the Beta 64 bit software that comes with it. But other than that you go ahead and go through the wizard here of installing the different options on your PC that come with the software. Now, obviously the drivers are all here the documentation and also the DivX supports so that way we can save our recordings as DivX and I'll talk about that in the second.
As we go through the installation here of the software we’ll be choosing the country that we’re in and of course the type of connection that we have, so we can either connect it to the antenna, to the wall, to the cable or using the audio video inputs that it comes with. You can connect it to your cable box for example. So in this case I'm going to just use the antenna, the high gain antenna that comes with the package from Pinnacle. Now of course depending on where you are the strength of the scan for channels is going to be stronger or weaker, right. So if you're closer to the main antenna on the areas that are broadcasting the signal then obviously you're going to get a better result so we’ll just go through letting it scan here using the antenna that’s going to find the analog channels which are your regular over the air analog rabbit here type of channels.
By the way it does have internet radio support as well and digital obviously. So once it has scanned everything then it’s going to display the results and then we can start watching some TV. The main thing that I wanted to talk about was the HDTV so I'm watching the HD free to air ATSC broadcasting that the antennas are able to pick up and you can see here I'm watching it in the window not full screen, I'm recording what I'm watching on the PC so I am in a way stress testing my PC and the software here and the tuner by recording what I'm watching to show you.
But if I wasn’t recording and stress testing it then obviously it would be a little bit smoother. Now you can see here that I can pause with the remote that it comes with. It comes with the nice, little mini remote and you can rewind and then go through watching your channels and catch up and see anything that you might have miss so that’s a neat little feature. Now if you don’t want to use the remote obviously if you right click on the window, the TV viewing area you have similar options that appear on the remote and you can control those from there as well.
There are some additional options that appear here when you right click on the windows that do not appear and any can't access using the remote necessarily. So you can go ahead and select different options here like always on top, the size or do you want the bars at the tops of the frame to show 16 x 9 or the standard size Window for example whether you want to watch it at the 720 x 480. So those are little things that you can try and then of course you can go into the settings.
Now in the settings themselves you'll be able to navigate and tweak the way you want this application to work and of course scan again all the channels. Okay, so depending on where you are in your house for example if you’re upstairs close to outside, to a window and you're using this antenna you're going to get better reception if you're perhaps closer to the city as oppose to far away out and some farm land for example. So you'll be surprise though this catches quite a bit and the reception is quite good.
So you can go through these options and let it scan. You can let also download a programming guides for the channels that it has scanned already and then you can also specify the different areas that you want to capture too and how to capture those. So the video formats. For example, DivX is a popular video format to record TV shows in because it compresses them and it keeps the high quality so I used the DivX for example in my task to record or you can just burn it directly to a DVD if you want and have it on the DVD inflate on your DivX player if you have that.
So as you can see here while I'm showing and recording this I'm playing in the background the hockey game that’s just the about to start. So I'm going to stress test this even further by recording the hockey game and also I'm recording that I'm recording it so this is a double warning here that I'm actually putting a lot of stress on to see how smooth this recording is actually going to turn out base on what I'm doing so I'm recording it now and I'm watching the live events here as they unfold and I'm capturing what I'm showing you. So I'm using my video camera or anything. I'm using the software that I have my video capturing software to capture that I am recording this.
And the recording actually itself which I'm going to show you in a second is actually pretty good, okay so despite of what you’ve seen here and what we’re looking here I'm just going to stop the recording for a second here so I can catch up and you're going to see that it’s going to be very smooth in the second here and it’s basically running at 1080i so up to 1080i resolution for high depth.
This is the high depth channel that we’re looking at here and it’s free using the antenna that it came with. I'm not using a cable box. I'm not plug in to the wall. I'm not using satellite. This is what I'm getting for free using that and of course I can record this and I've set it up to record and you can enable time shifting too so how much delay do you want enabled in order to capture. You can do all that and set that in here in these settings and how you want this all displayed in your monitor and so forth.
Everything is in here it’s a very complete package with lots of different options to choose from of course when it comes to recording and that’s important. And where you want to plug things into so like I said I'm using the antenna but I've also tested this plug in directly into the cable wall into the outlet and it was perfect obviously. The signal is 100% and it’s smooth very, very nice. So this TV tuner is actually very flexible that you cannot only choose different file formats to record as but you can set it up as a PVR, you can set it up to use your antenna or your cable box and it’s an alternative to having a TV basically. All right, so you can just use your regular PC as your TV. So it was very interesting.
So now let's take a look at the recording of that packing intro that I just did. So I opened up the AVI fall the DivX fall that I just recorded two seconds ago and here it is. Okay, I'm playing it back and as you can see even though I was stress testing and recording the fact that I was recording this on the same PC it’s very smooth. That’s very smooth and this high depth. This is the intro for the hockey game and it looks great. It is terrific.
So imagine if you weren’t multi tasking and doing anything and you just watching high depth full screen TV it’s perfect as long as you have a good signal like I said and close to an antenna then you're great. So I definitely have a conclusion here. This is a great little feature and we want to talk a little bit about the conclusion so overall I guess the PC TV HD Pro Stick delivers a terrific package so I can't say anything more about that.
The performance is good as long as you have a fast processor and enough memory of course. You don’t what to be multi taking necessarily so you can stay away from that but the flexibility is great. You can connect it to different outlets receiver boxes or use the antenna and I was getting about 80% reception quality so it was terrific the quality.
So thank you Pinnacle for letting me try this out and I hope you enjoy this video and thank you for watching.
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