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The Pro Stick generally delivers what it promises.
So you’re sitting around, totally bored with the same old PC, bored with word processing, bored with spreadsheets, bored with Web browsing, bored with music, bored with news, bored with grainy YouTube videos.
Well, for a hundred bucks, you can satisfy that high-definition craving with the Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick. Plug this nifty little gadget into a USB port on your computer, hook up an antenna or cable feed to the other end and you’re in business — HDTV in a window on your desktop, or full-screen if you prefer.
The software bundle includes a digital video recorder (DVR) so you can record your favourite shows while you’re not there. There’s even a tiny remote control so you can watch without getting out of your chair.
The Pro Stick also has an intriguing feature whose existence I was only vaguely aware of before this. It’s a circuit called a QAM tuner, which brings in unscrambled digital broadcasts, including some in high-definition, directly from a cable company feed — without a cable box, high-def or otherwise. QAM is also built into most new digital sets.
You won’t get your cable company’s whole digital menu, most of which is scrambled unless you rent a digital box. But you’ll generally see the same digital channels you’d pick up with an antenna, without the vagaries of digital reception over-the-air. You may even pick up some video-on-demand channels if someone in your neighbourhood is watching them.
First things first — there’s only so much TV you can expect from a hundred-dollar PC gadget. The Pro Stick generally delivers what it promises, but there’s no way a picture processed through software by a PC and displayed on a monitor that’s not optimised for television is going to look as good as it would on a stand-alone HDTV set — or on even a monitor driven by an internal PC tuner.
Still, the quality was fine for casual, close-up viewing — better than analog TV tuner cards I’ve tried in the past. For that reason, the Pro Stick is a cheap and efficient way to turn a student’s laptop into a dorm room entertainment centre. Assuming you’re OK with a student who watches “Desperate Housewives” instead of studying.
The Pro Stick is a black box about the size of your thumb, and about twice the volume of a flash memory drive. It can plug directly into a USB 2.0 port, but a short, bundled extension cable gives it more flexibility.
The other end of the tuner sports a standard coaxial connector for an antenna or cable feed. Rounding out the package are the small remote control, a monopole antenna for direct, over-the-air tuning, audiovisual cables to pull an analog signal directly from a set-top cable box, and two software CDs.
To process HDTV, you’ll need reasonably up-to-date hardware. The minimum requirement is a Pentium 4 processor running at 2.8 GHz or better, a gigabyte of memory, Windows XP or Vista, and at least 20 gigabytes of free hard drive space if you want to record programmes.
I installed it on a 3-year-old Gateway with a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 chip, and the tuner worked with only an occasional stutter. Most new dual-core, Intel or AMD processors should have no trouble with it.
Setup was easy. I installed Pinnacle’s TVCentre Pro software, connected the tuner to the antenna and started the program. TVCentre displays the picture in a resizable window, changes channels and serves as a front end to the program guide and DVR.
I had TVCentre scan for both analog and digital channels, as well as FM radio stations and Internet radio sites. The device, which includes both NTSC (analog) and ATSC (digital) tuners, found analog signals from all Baltimore stations and a few from Washington.
It found all the digital signals from Baltimore, but lost most of the Washington stations, which is similar to the experience I had with broadcast converter boxes a few weeks ago.
The TV centre displayed a crisp, clear picture on a 17-inch Dell LCD monitor — particularly with digital channels, which is not surprising, since that’s one of their advantages. HD images were sharper still, although I had to turn up the brightness and contrast on my monitor. Like most displays designed for computers, its default settings weren’t jacked up as high as a typical TV set.
When I switched to the Comcast cable feed in my home office, the HDTV Pro Stick took about 20 minutes to search for channels and turned up several hundred of them — most of which turned out to be scrambled digital signals that require a box for decoding.
But unscrambled digital signals from local broadcast outlets were there, plus a couple of clear channels from Comcast’s digital tier. That was the QAM tuner at work.
The main problem was that Comcast’s scheme for numbering upper-level digital channels and the numbers TVCenter displayed bore almost no correlation. In fact, each cable company has its own numbering scheme. You have to figure out what they are.
Likewise, the “premium” electronic program guide, from epgData.com, is nonintuitive with some holes and occasional inaccuracies in the schedule. Given those problems, it still doesn’t take much effort to schedule a recording, either by finding the programme title or the old-fashioned way, by entering its date, time and channel.
The quality of the hard drive playback was good, although it’s hard to compare with the real thing because it’s displayed on a monitor, not a TV screen. Just make sure you have plenty of hard drive space if you like to keep recordings for a while.
Bottom line: It may not replace a dedicated DVR, but Pinnacle’s HDTV Pro Stick turns your PC into a TV set and pulls in every analog and digital channel that’s available (and unscrambled), whether you’re using an antenna or cable feed. It’s relatively cheap, and you can use it on more than one PC.
Not a bad toy for Dad, with that day coming up. |
