- Turn your PC or Mac into the perfect TV
- Ultra-sensitive digital terrestrial TV & radio1 reception
- Watch and record digital TV in standard and high definition
- Works with Windows Media Center
- Remote control and mini-antenna included
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Product Features
Product details
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Product Description
Manufacturer's Description
With its latest generation chipset, the gem-sized Pinnacle PCTV nanoStick Ultimate delivers high-quality digital TV and is ready for terrestrial HDTV (in MPEG-4 AVC / H.264), where available. Watch TV in full-screen or scaleable-window mode. The included software turns your PC or Mac into a full-fledged Personal Video Recorder that lets you timeshift and record TV shows. PC users can shoose between MPEG-1/2 or DivX recording formats or record direct to DVD. The included Pinnacle DistanTV software allows them to stream TV to other PCs on a local network. Recordings can be trimmed with Pinnacle VideoSpin. Mini remote included
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
I've had this for a few weeks and all in all it's good if you can get your hand on decent software.
The stick itself is tiny: at about 5cm x 2.25cm x 1.5cm it's smaller than some USB drives, and it doesn't feel cheap. It has a sliding cover that you can use to protect the USB connection when it's not in use and has a blue activity LED that (probably deliberately) isn't bright enough to annoy you if you're watching TV in the dark. All in all feels pretty high quality. One end has a socket that you can either attach to the included aerial or connect to an adaptor that will let you use the stick with any normal aerial connection. My only hardware gripe is that the adaptor has a pretty narrow connector to the stick, and I'd be a bit worried about it snapping if you put pressure on it.
The software that they include with it is rubbish though: mine came with Pinnacle TVCenter 4. There are a lot of reports of it being buggy and let me tell you, they're not exaggerating. It's slow to start, it has an annoying habit of spontaneously crashing for no apparent reason once every now and again, switching between channels is slow and laggy and it over complicates the setup and settings. The interface is also useless: you have to click through several menus to get to the proper TV guide which is annoying when you just want to browse, and skipping back/forward/up/down the list is slow. Absolutely worst of all, it scans for TV channels ridiculously slowly (seeing a pattern here?). There are 3 scan methods: quick, normal and best quality. There is absolutely no point in doing anything except best quality because otherwise the software can miss entire TV channels, but if you choose best quality it can easily sit there for over 2 hours and, if you're unlucky and the signal is bad, it'll then tell you it found no channels and you need to do it again. Wonderful.
I have tried it with other software though, and in this case the stick is great. I have a laptop with Windows Media Centre and in a few minutes it found 65 channels with good signal and picture quality using the included titchy aerial (I live in Belfast city, so the signal is half decent but not excellent). It integrates with MC perfectly and gives a pretty excellent experience to be honest. If you don't have Media Centre there are other free programs you could try it with like MediaPortal, but I've not had much luck with them.
Overall this is a great stick hardware wise; matched with good quality software it's a great and convenient way to watch and record TV from a desktop PC or a laptop. I can't think of any reason to not recommend it with software like Windows Media Centre. If, however, you don't have Windows Media Center you might be stuck, and Media Center is expensive to get a hold of and involves a bit of upgrading Windows.
If you have Media Center I'd thoroughly recommend this. Otherwise, your results may vary with the software you use; you'll not want to use the Pinnacle stuff included at any rate.
Stuff in the box:
1x PCTV Nano 73e stick
1x short USB lead
1x small aerial
1x standard aerial cable adaptor
CDs of Windows and Mac drivers and software
EDIT: Whoops, I forgot it includes a small remote control with 2xAAA batteries as well.
The stick itself is tiny: at about 5cm x 2.25cm x 1.5cm it's smaller than some USB drives, and it doesn't feel cheap. It has a sliding cover that you can use to protect the USB connection when it's not in use and has a blue activity LED that (probably deliberately) isn't bright enough to annoy you if you're watching TV in the dark. All in all feels pretty high quality. One end has a socket that you can either attach to the included aerial or connect to an adaptor that will let you use the stick with any normal aerial connection. My only hardware gripe is that the adaptor has a pretty narrow connector to the stick, and I'd be a bit worried about it snapping if you put pressure on it.
The software that they include with it is rubbish though: mine came with Pinnacle TVCenter 4. There are a lot of reports of it being buggy and let me tell you, they're not exaggerating. It's slow to start, it has an annoying habit of spontaneously crashing for no apparent reason once every now and again, switching between channels is slow and laggy and it over complicates the setup and settings. The interface is also useless: you have to click through several menus to get to the proper TV guide which is annoying when you just want to browse, and skipping back/forward/up/down the list is slow. Absolutely worst of all, it scans for TV channels ridiculously slowly (seeing a pattern here?). There are 3 scan methods: quick, normal and best quality. There is absolutely no point in doing anything except best quality because otherwise the software can miss entire TV channels, but if you choose best quality it can easily sit there for over 2 hours and, if you're unlucky and the signal is bad, it'll then tell you it found no channels and you need to do it again. Wonderful.
I have tried it with other software though, and in this case the stick is great. I have a laptop with Windows Media Centre and in a few minutes it found 65 channels with good signal and picture quality using the included titchy aerial (I live in Belfast city, so the signal is half decent but not excellent). It integrates with MC perfectly and gives a pretty excellent experience to be honest. If you don't have Media Centre there are other free programs you could try it with like MediaPortal, but I've not had much luck with them.
Overall this is a great stick hardware wise; matched with good quality software it's a great and convenient way to watch and record TV from a desktop PC or a laptop. I can't think of any reason to not recommend it with software like Windows Media Centre. If, however, you don't have Windows Media Center you might be stuck, and Media Center is expensive to get a hold of and involves a bit of upgrading Windows.
If you have Media Center I'd thoroughly recommend this. Otherwise, your results may vary with the software you use; you'll not want to use the Pinnacle stuff included at any rate.
Stuff in the box:
1x PCTV Nano 73e stick
1x short USB lead
1x small aerial
1x standard aerial cable adaptor
CDs of Windows and Mac drivers and software
EDIT: Whoops, I forgot it includes a small remote control with 2xAAA batteries as well.
Amazon Verified Purchase
great piece of equipment a bit expensive for what you get but the size is great for a laptop. picture and ease of set up is great it does what it say's on the tin
