Ordered it yesterday from Murderface at the lowest price and got it today. So far very happy.
Rating: 5 / 5

I installed this product in my new HP Pavilion a6514f with 3GB of RAM and Intel Core Duo processor running at 2GHz. The machine is running Vista 32 Home Premium edition with SP1.

The installation of this card and software went smoothly. Once installed, however, the software showed significant signs of instability. Trying to change channels would sometimes result in a hang or freeze of the application. Trying to use Windows Media Center (on Vista SP1) was encouraging at first, but even the latest drivers downloaded from the Pinnacle support website don’t solve the issues; Media center actually crashes with an application error.

The “TVCenter Pro” software which is Pinnacle’s recommended TV-viewing product is supposed to support “timeshifting” (IE the ability to pause your Live TV viewing, go back, jump forward, a la TiVo). It sort-of works, but just like everything else about this software, it’s herky-jerky, unresponsive, unpredictable, and the user interface (display of where you are in the time-shift time regime) is pretty dorky. The audio easily gets out of sync with the video.

I was really excited at first, since the reception seems to be fine in both SD and HD off my Comcast digital cable. Once I really started pushing the software to actually do something “whiz bang” I was sorely disappointed. This is very much in keeping with my experience with the other Pinnacle software product, their “Studio” line of non-linear editing software for video productions. They crank out version after version, but each version is buggy and unstable for quite a while. By the time it’s getting close to being useable and robust, they abandon that major release number and roll out a new one, which starts the cycle all over again.

Roxio, Intuit, Pinnacle… I wonder if the same software engineering managers have worked at all three places? They sure do seem to follow the same product quality philosophy!

Rating: 2 / 5

I bought this card with expectations of getting clear QAM HD. The included drivers do NOT support clear QAM, you have to download the BETA software from Pinnacle’s website (still no updates since 11/07). The software is very buggy, poor sync between video and sound, etc. I would stay FAR AWAY from this card if you want HD. One other reviewer rolled back to the original drivers, which means no HD. I didn’t buy this card for regular video.
Rating: 1 / 5

I bought this card to replace an existing tuner card that doesn’t have HD capability. I use comcast cable and Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

I’ll be switching back to the old card for the following reasons:

- The audio is completely messed up. Try searching for this product with the search term “audio sync” and see I’m not alone. The card works for a while then the audio gradually gets more and more out of synch with the video, until it’s off by up to two seconds. Completely useless and unwatchable.

- The picture quality is poor. Compared to my old non-HD card, the picture quality is quite noticably worse. Who cares though, the audio problem is a show stopper.

I did not buy this from Amazon, I’m just hoping to save someone else the mistake of buying this thing.
Rating: 1 / 5

My Phenom X4 system with Vista Premium 64 bit hates this card. You would think I was running it on a Pentium II with 640k the way it stutters and stops. Tried Media Center with Pinnacle driver and no matter what it would not find the tuner. I suspect it runs fine on 32 bit Vista.

Did a good job of finding the QAM’s but impossible to watch.

Swapped it for a Hauppauge 1250 board and much happier.
Rating: 2 / 5