Another fine product to avoid is the Pinnacle PCTV Hybrid Stick Solo (340e SE), unless you have perfect cable TV reception.
This card might drive you up the wall with frustration, if you’re trying to view live TV via cable reception, the card is not well designed to handle anything less than 80% reception quality. Now this might sound reasonable, but for a lot of people living in apartment blocks, using the wall cable outlets, the actual signal quality is not always above 80%, it can be a little lower eg:77%. In anycase some TV Cards, like the Avermedia one I ranted about in my earlier post, can at least give you video and audio output on weaker signals, well, not this Pinnacle Card, if the signal is slightly less than desirable, you’ll hear nothing but static hissing, but you will get picture. If you’re using a straigh antenna, then this card should give you no problems, and its MCE compatable (after a patch from Pinnacle).
But there is one last caution about this card, it comes with a mini antenna, the base is a giant magnet – yes thats right, take this antenna too close to your HDD and good bye data. Not sure what they were thinking.
Pinnacle have a live support help line, but don’t expect any “real” assistance, the advice I got, was not check the signal, but instead contact Toshiba and ask them to disable your shared graphics memory, in their opinion this was the reason behind the static audio and hissing. This was also after I told them I tested it on 3 differant machines, all with the same result.
If you buy this product, don’t complain later, by the time you read this, the one I bought will be back in the shop, and I’ll exchange it for a better non pinnacle product.
