I've been using the sourceforge bt8x8 drivers with my Pinnacle PCTV since I bought the thing, but last night I decided to try out the oem 4.02a drivers I found on the net.

The biggest complaint about the oem drivers has been that they won't work with VDub because of the WDM/VFW issue. Typically VDub will report that it can't open the capture device. Second is that the capture resolutions are too few and too useleless in the joke of a capture program that they bundle with the card..

So I uninstalled the generic drivers and ran the Pinnacle driver install, and after a reboot things were okay. The kicker was "overlay" mode. I was able to go into capture mode in VDub and pick my settings with a live picture showing in overlay mode, but of course when I hit F6 to start capturing, VDub didn't see the device. So I then changed from overlay to preview mode, and tried again and it captured just fine.

Under "video:format" the res choices were useless, however I was able to choose 720X480 under the "set custom format" option.

If you are asking why I bothered, the reason is this: I decided I wanted to play around with watching video on my computer screen. As it stands now, I can cap to my preferred res in VDub, or watch TV in the "PCVision program, full screen if I wish. I also found another benefit: I can now directly compare my source video from my camcorder to my finished mpegs, just by switching between PCVision and PowerDVD (can't have 'em both onscreen at once cuz they're both overlaying). Let me tell you, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my Hi8 caps (720X480, Huffyuv to TMPGEnc 720X480 mpeg2 6K VBR) looked indistinguishable from the original. (BTW if you think 720X480 is ridiculous for Hi8, I will be playing with 352X480 as a final res as I get more practice, my final product is DVD-R).

Any comments?

I'm using DirectX 8.1, so I believe the VFW wrapper is coming into play. Also, based upon the comments over in the Pinnacle forum, it's best to stay away from the version 5 drivers.