Aaaaarrrrg! the Pinnacle PCTV Pro is driving me NUTS

[dZeus]

The driver situation in Win2k is horrorfying at best... random crashes, no full-res capture possibility, no stereo capture possibility, etc. etc. etc.

I'll try to get hold of a RRG for my G400 until I get a future card with tuning/captuing possibilities

[Greebe]

If you post this over in DeskTop Video forum you'll get answers faster, D'oh!

[dZeus]

not really a question Greebe... more a sort of ventilating my frustrations over this card! soon I won't be bothered with this POS I hope

[This message has been edited by dZeus (edited 26 January 2001).]

[fds]

Get BorgTV and rejoice!

http://www.kki.net.pl/~borgx/

It's like a dream come true and more for all the long-suffering owners of Bt848/878 cards when they finally come across this gem.

Don't thank me for the link, as there are already more than enough people still thanking me for directing them there.

Only for PAL though. I'm not quite sure which system are they using on the Mars.

[dZeus]

I've tried BorgTV before... I can't get it to make it tune... I've tried every tuner setting available in the program, all to no avail...

[fds]

That could be a driver problem. BTV comes with its own drivers and does not necessarily need to have the manufacturer's software installed. In fact it cannot coexist with them sometimes.

A friend of mine, also with a PCTV Pro, only managed to get BTV to work after a clean reinstall of Windows (he was using Win98 though).

BTV works fine for me on a Pinnacle Studio PCTV Pro, AverMedia TVPhone98 and a Aimslab VideoHighway Extreme. (Both in WinMe and Win2k.)

In Win9x/Me BTV should work even if you leave the TV card as an Unknown PCI Video Device in Device Manager and only install BTV's drivers (which do not make Windows recognize the card, only allows BTV to access the hardware directly).

If you are using ACPI and Win2k, you should have some basic driver (but only that) installed so Win2k can configure the card's resources, when left as an unknown device Win2k does not bother to properly initialize it which results in BTV crashing on startup.

I myself use and suggest the drivers stripped from AverMedia's <a href="http://www.averm.com.cn/download/tvp982k.zip">W2k driver package</a> on all the cards. Do NOT run setup, only Upgrade the devices in Device Manager pointing to the inf files.
[It looks like these drivers has been updated somewhat since I last got them, I hope they haven't changed anything significant in the base drivers.]

All I can say it's worth spending the time to make it work, you'll be very grateful for doing so later. Though I didn't need anyting special, it just worked; even with all the StudioPCTV applications on the system, the only time BTV failed was when AverMedia's W2k software was also installed.

[dZeus]

Thanks for all the info!

I'll take a look at the drivers you linked... btw. can I still have stereo reception with those drivers?

[This message has been edited by dZeus (edited 28 January 2001).]

[fds]

I'm not sure about stereo but that has nothing to do with these drivers (they will only serve as a placeholder so Win2k can assign the card resources).

Whether BTV supports stereo, I don't know.

The crappy cable provider here only gives us mono channels until they finally get their act together and upgrade their cables in my neighborhood.

[Wulfman]

I just found this thread while searching for a solution for my small BorgTV-problem.

The program itself is working great - after dealing with the "official" 5.01 stuff from pinnacle it was a nice surprise to see that the card can produce a picture without crashing the strange vision program.

(4.* -> picture/sound, but crashing too often, 5.* -> sound, but no picture)

Now only a small issue is left - can the BorgTV window be placed on top of the desktop automatically? I was searching through the help and the FAQ but found nothing.

thx,
wulfman

PS.: Pinnacle PCTV pro

[Dogbert]

Welcome to the club, I have the same shit.

I heard that the TV cards made by STB (without can-tuner, chip tuner instead) are really great. Alas there is none to be found.

I relly hate my Pinnacle, using win2k, picture quality for video input is so-so, and for my dreamcast (tuner connection) it's really horrible compared with a real TV.