Good capture scheduller ( DVR or digital VCR )

[donpedro]

I might stick with Pinnacle's PCTV Deluxe. This is external USB hardaware MPEG2 encoder + TV card, but it does not come with any capture scheduller. Is there some (free will be nice) sofware that I will be able to use it with ?

Couple of names that I found around here:

iuVCR
WinDVR
WinVCR
VirtualVCR
PowerVCR II

[boss]

well, powervcr2 has a schedulling agent. but i've never used it. because there's hardly anything on t.v. worth recording!

[kitzj0]

DonPedro

I am relatively new to all of this. Have only discovered these forums a couple of months ago. I just tried a couple of weeks ago the Pinnacle Deluxe-TV USB and did not have the best experience with it. The one I bought came with a schedule PVR program. The problems I had were several:

1) The software didn't install the USB device properly, so I tried to uninstall and re-install. This did not work because the program makes changes in your registery files. Pinnacle provides a utility to reg-delete these files, but guess what? They don't have any support yet for this product. Appaerently they rel;eased a product and din't offer any support for it. You can read about this in their web forums

http://webboard.pinnaclesys.com/read_forums.asp?WebboardID=1&SectionID=80&lng=1&Produc...bDocTypesID=76

So I could not reg-delete the files for this product which meant I had to restore my whole system.

2) Finally got it working, but crashed often where it would not recognize the capture device and had to do the restore 2 more times.

3) Capture quality was ok, but had A/V out of sync problems when burned on DVD.

4) Took back to CompUSA with a print out from Pinnacle saying they are not providing support for this product at this time and got a full refund. I also have noticed they no longer have this on their shelves.

The fact there was no support really bothered me, however from reading the web forums they are planning a major upgrade the next few weeks. Apparently these devices are OEM's from another company and Pinnacle writes their own software for it. It seems like they released a product where their software has a lot of issues.

I have Pinnacle Studio 8 and have not had many problems with it and like the software.

I settled on a win-tv pvr 250 from hauppage. I had an initial problem with install, but restored my system (now an expert on this, it only takes about 15 minutes) and works perfectly. In my opinion, on my system, this provides much better picture quality than the Pinnacle USB product. The DVD's I author look great on my TV with no problems with Audio/video being out of sync. I like the fact you can rcord with varable bit recording instead of just constant bit recording. I think the USB has alot of potential, but if you are looking for something to work right away, you may have to play with it a little. I can tell you though, you probably won't be able to capture in .avi format and probably won't be able to capture or use third party software. The same is the case for Hauppauge, but it works for what I want to do...record TV programs and then burn to DVD-RW to watch later.

[donpedro]

kitzj0, Thank you very much, I am aware of all current issues around Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe.

About CompUSA ... I can still see them on the shelves. I am hoping that new update, that should be released soon, will work much better. In mean time I was reading too that it manufactured by different company and I heared that with their sofware it works, so I am hoping that it is fixable. That other software should be able to set also VBR and not just CBR. So result of my reading is that Pinnacle's sofware is faulty and not hardware. They should make it work or I will need to find out how to get that other software.

Again thanks for warning.