I own a Hauppage WinTV PCI card (the most basic model) and I am quite happy with it. My only concern is that not having an S-video input, the quality of my captures is not as good as it could be. Therefore, when I saw the Pinnacle PCTV Pro deal at CompUSA ($30 after MIR) I jumped on it. The installation went without any problem on my Win2K system. However, when capturing with VirtualDub I observed
that many frames are dropped. I know for sure that this due to synchronization between audio and video because, if I choose not to save audio everything is fine. I had the same problem with my old WinTV card and the solution was to increase the sampling rate of the sound from 22KHz to 44KHz (as it should be). At 44KHz, the PCTV card drops 3 frames every 5 seconds or so (at any resolution). Increasing
the rate at 48KHz yields much better results: 1/500 frames
dropped. Still, I am not satified, I want to do better than that. The WinTV card almost doesn't drop any frame. Because the two cards are based on same chip (BTB87 and on the same tuner (Phillips) I assume that they should behave pretty much the same. Thinking that I just got a bad card, I went to CompUSA and bought another PCTV. Unfortunately
it behaves the same, so whatever the problem is, it probably plagues all cards (or at least the whole lot that is currently on sale). The only difference I could see between the WinTV card and PCTV cards is the quartz oscillator which is bulkier on PCTV.

I tried even other capture programs. AVI_IO behaves like VirtualDub dropping many frames. iuVCR (on top of WDM drivers) says 0 dropped frames, but I have some doubts about that. The average frame rate decreases, sometimes significantly, and the only explanation I can think of for this behavior is dropped frames. Also, I couldn't make
the audio work. Granted, I didn't try very hard because the program is not free and it doesn't make sense to pay for software when you buy a very cheap capture card.

The VFW wrapper on top of the WDM driver limits the capture at 288 lines, so this is not a viable solution. Currently, I am out of options. Does anybody have any idea on how I could get rid of those frame drops? (buying a new sound card is not a solution)

Other minor annoyances of the PCTV card are:
- colors are not as vivid as on my TV or WinTV card
- no closed captioning
- when I switch to S-Video input I can still hear the sound of the last TV channel
- it overheats (WinTV is barely warm, while PCTV is very hot)
- in Preview Mode in VirtualDub the image is very choppy
(looks perfect with the WinTV capture drivers).

So to wrap-up I think that PCTV is inferior to WinTv, both from the software and hardware perspective. I will still keep the card though given the remote control, and especially the price.