I bought a Pinnacle PCTV PCI card, that allows me to tune cable and aerial TV, on my Windows' desktop. The idea is simply brilliant, and has been maturing over the years. It would be great, if this (not expensive) hardware could really just be plugged-in, and then you could start recording video on your HD. Unfortunately, things aren't that easy, and Windows 2000 brought a problem that many drivers' providers, simply are taking too much time to address.

The first problem that real time video recording brings, is data rate. You probably don't have enough RAM for more than 5 seconds of video, so most software for video recording, doesn't even allow you to choose such option, recording only directly to the hard disk.

Today's hard disks can easily sustain the data rate required by real-time high quality video, but a few years ago, things were harder and only SCSI owners could do that. You might have seen some HDs labeled as "AV HD", which means "Audio-Video Hard Disk", ie, hard disks that can handle audio-video recording... the label originates from those days.

Once you have a fast enough HD, you'd better check that it is BIG enough to satisfy your needs. The PCTV board requires 115 MB per 1 minute of 320 x 240 video, using a proprietary Miro compression algorithm! If your PC isn't speedy enough to do real-time compression (and most PCs can't handle that), you'll have to record without compression... Such scenario will absolutely DRAIN your HD's capacity in a few minutes time...

So, one of my quests was finding the best compressor, for real-time video recording AND real-time compression. I did NOT want to do video recording in two stages: #1) recording without compression; #2) applying a compressor to the recorded file. And I wanted to do it using Windows 2000... an Operating System that many hardware products don't fully support yet.

My PCTV board is supplied with hardware drivers and a software bundle, known as "PCTV version 3.5". This is the LATEST official software for the board, and the first to offer a very limited support under Windows 2000. Incredibly, Pinnacle is NOT offering this software from their website, and people who bought the gear, previous to year 2000, are probably using the old version 3.0 software, that doesn't support Microsoft's latest OS. This is a wrong attitude.

To make things worst, Pinnacle was offering a version 4.0 PCTV CDROM @ the 2000 CeBIT. People who were fortunate enough to lay hands on such gift, were told about a much better Windows 2000 support.

As soon as the 4.0 drivers were known outside Europe, users worldwide started protesting against the update NOT being available for download, but Pinnacle simply refused to offer the files...

Meanwhile you can download the FULL contents of the PCTV 4.0 CDROM offered @ CeBIT, here:

pctv4.zip [40 MB ZIP file]

Today, things HALF changed. The main Pinnacle website is still NOT offering the 4.0 drivers, but the european site, is allowing its download, as a BETA release.

You can download the Official european Pinnacle 4.0 Beta software release here:

pctv40en.exe [13 MB EXE file]

Notice that the files are different. I tried them both, and I have some strong conclusions:

- the pctv4.zip file somehow includes a faster Windows 2000 driver.

- the pctv40en.exe file, includes a great teletext software, for viewing teletext pages, from within a web browser.

- both files will NOT allow video recording with real-time compressors, using CODECs other than Miro's proprietary stuff and MPEG4 v1 + v2. This means that you will NOT be able to use Intel's INDEO 5.11 CODEC, which is my favorite, for real-time efforts.

- The packages' main application (PC TVision), now supports video-recorder, video-player and snapshot modes, but recording must be done without compression, snapshots are only possible in huge BMPs, and the software is much heavier on the processor.

Tomorrow I will continue this article and publish some pictures that show how heavy is the new software... relative to the 3.5 release.