Pinnacle 22427 PCTV HD USB Mini Stick

I recently purchased the device to watch basic television on a portable device. I had to get rid of my analog portable television set. I decided to try this instead of paying $200 for a decent digital portable television. I was not disappointed. I am using this product on a netbook, the HP mini 1000. It works great with the external antenna. I only tried it at home (in a big city) and I got 14 very clear channels. The picture and sound quality are great. I have not used the recording functions due to the limitations of the netbook memory. I only paid about $60 for this item at a local Best Buy store. It was worth the money. It does concern me that the device gets very hot after a short time of use. I have not used it for an extended period of time, but it is a concern I have about the item. So far, so good. The setup and installation of the software was simple. The device will take a few minutes to scan for available channels. Until they produce some better portable LCD TVs, if you have a laptop, give this a try.

Software is not ready for windows 7. Downloaded latest from the Pinnacle site. A visit to the Pinnacle support site before I purchased would have been a good idea. Others report similar crashes with this, and no resolution other than wait for updated Pinnacle TVCenter Pro software.

The good news is that if you use just the Vista drivers and delete the Pinnacle TVCenter Pro software, Windows Media Player works well with the device itself. Even just using the included antenna, it picked up all my local channels, as well as some quite far away. The remote is useless without the Pinnacle TVCenter software. Hopefully Pinnacle will update the software so the whole package works. Until then this is a 1 star item...

UPDATE 7 December 2009: Pinnacle support does not even acknowledge my e-mailed request for assistance. Prior purchases of Pinnacle products required zero interaction with support. I see they have updated software for non-US products, so maybe we will get a Win7 version in the US soon.

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This product works perfectly. QAM and ATSC channels are not always found automatically through a scan. In this case, I found all my channels from the antenna provided and also the cable wire. But, I have read that if the channel guide can't match up certain information it will not list the channel. Probably not the best way to handle the setup, but it seems to be set that way because they were trying to avoid too many wrongly identified channels. The whole digital thing is confusing to everyone.

However regardless of what system you might use, you might have to go and look up a channel's frequency and go into your software and somehow program the channel manually. Say you can't see channel 4-2. You go and google what the frequency is for 4-2 and you put that in your directory, and it will be there.

For whatever it's worth, the very small antenna that came with this product was shockingly GOOD.

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The following is my updated specs so you will know that even the newest is not ready.

Device Manager PCTV 80e Driver = 5.2010.901.0

PCTV Package Windows Media Center = 4.1.0.148

PCTV TVCenter UPDATED NOV 23, 2010 = 6.4.0.784

My Specifications Are =

MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

AMD Phenom(tm) II N620 Dual-Core Processor 2.8Ghz 45nm Technology x86-64

4.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 675MHz (9-9-9-24)

Remote doesn't work either way which was why i wanted this one. software never starts. work only with windows media center for up to 24 channels with antenna but nothing from the cable wire. someone please get in touch with me if you figure out the remote and TV center situation feta87 at gmail dot com will update when something new changes or i figure something out.

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I bought this thinking it would be great, however even in the manual which stunned me, it says if the hardware dose not work keep trying to take it out and put it in. I tried numerous times, I couldn't get it to work. I'm extremely computer literate. It's the actual stick you insert that the computer won't except. Afterwards I uninstalled the software and removed the folder from my Programs. It caused major problems to a point I had to Restore my new laptop back to it's factory condition.

I bought another brand for about $30 it's the hdtv stick, by arcsoft, it's a little long and I would suggest if you don't have one a flat usb hub because the stick is too heavy to not be flat against a surface, but it does work great, no problems installing it or the software.