Pinnacle Studion AV 7.0

[bryanjohnfields]

Does anyone know anything about this card?

I just bought a Pinnacle PCTV Pro Card at my local CompUSA. When I was getting it I noticed the Pinnacle Studio AV 7.0. It looked promising; it has a wide variety of capture options and outputs MPG1 & MPG2. Does this mean it has real-time hardware compression? And it was only $130.

I would be very interested to hear from anyone who has this card.

Thanks

[Anonymous65]

A few important facts as far as I know:
It's the same card as the DC-10+ card, hardware Mjpeg. I believe the card can do 702x480, even thought the DC-10+ could only do 640x480. It can only capture up to 70 minutes, no matter how much hard drive space you have (a limit I don't understand, and a problem if you want to capture a 2 hour movie). mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 compression is done using softwear compression of the mjpeg file. Not sure how good the mpeg compresion software is. Otherwise, this would be a nice setup if you want to capture, edit, and then output to VCD, SVCD or DVD. Personally, I cannot live with the 70 minute time limit of captures.

[Ronin2]

skittelsen,
If the card is based on the DC-10+, then the 70 min capture limit could be due to the 71 min bug as detailed in the VDub site Capture Documentation. (reproduced below)

Why does my video capture stop at 1 hour, 11 minutes, but I still get audio?

"This is a bug in many video capture drivers. The exact limit is actually 232 microseconds, or 1 hour, 11 minutes, 34 seconds. Many TV tuner devices are susceptable to this bug, as are the miro/Pinnacle DCxx devices; you may be able to fix the problem simply by upgrading to the latest capture drivers. There are two incarnations of this problem. In the non-fatal version, video frames are still sent to the application, but the timestamp on the video stream starts over from zero. VirtualDub will correct for this problem automatically, allowing you to capture beyond 71 minutes. The other possibility is that the driver stops sending data altogether. VirtualDub will notify you if this occurs, but will not be able to capture past 71 minutes in this case.

Vanilla capture devices based on the Conexant/Brooktree BT848/878 reference drivers are usually either immune to the problem or have the non-fatal form of it. I'm told that the bug in Pinnacle's DC30(+) drivers still exists but is nonfatal as of the 1.41a drivers. As of this writing, the bug in the DC10/10+/20/20+ drivers is fatal and cannot be worked around.

There are apparently a few drivers that are even susceptable to half this limit (35 min.) due to using signed 32-bit arithmetic. VirtualDub does not yet detect or attempt to bypass the 35 minute limit that results."


Ronin2