[tags]vista, media center, hdtv, pinnacle,[/tags]

This week I got a Pinnacle HD Pro Stick, a USB HDTV over-the-air tuner. It’s pretty nifty, even though Vista support is (of course) still beta. I installed the drivers that make it work with Vista’s Media Center from Pinnacle’s site, and went through the setup process (adding lineups and stuff). The quality of over the air HD is great, but my Core Duo laptop is choking on it. I don’t know yet if it’s the processor or lack of disk space. Reinstalling Vista on this laptop is going to happen soon so I’ll find out.

I also installed it on a Dell Optiplex 740, with a dual core AMD Athlon64 processor running Vista Ultimate. It worked like a charm on this system with the computer able to keep up with the HD stream with no problems. The Media Center interface is much better than my Comcast DVR at home, and close to Tivo in usability. I was able to easily schedule a NCAA tournament game to record, and the quality was amazing. A 2:45 HD recording was 19.1GB, so you do pay for that quality in disk space.

The major problem I’ve had with this device is that randomly I’ll start up Media Center and find there’s no tuner, when it’s installed and nothing had changed from the last time I ran it. I’m blaming the beta Vista drivers on right now, as uninstalling them and reinstalling them (a repair doesn’t work) fixes the problem. The only other issue is the processing power needed for HD is fairly large. I’ve been able to play some 720p streams fine on my laptop, but our CBS affiliate here streams in 1080i, and it’s usually choppy. I’ll see if a clean Vista install fixes that this week.

All-in-all, if you want a cheap HDTV solution, this is a good one.