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Pinnacle Video Transfer

Posted by Kathleen Maher on June 30th 2008 | Discuss
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The Pinnacle Video Capture and its little friend iPod. In this case the device is recording as you can see by the red lights and it’s recording to “better” mode because the two blue lights are lit up. It’s a very elegant system. Pinnacle has learned well from experience.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Such a simple idea and it works. The Pinnacle Video Transfer box has plenty of forerunners and they too were often capable machines if a tad complicated. The Pinnacle Video Transfer box is a simple analog video recorder that attaches to your machine via composite, S-Video, or Stereo Audio.

Some of the major differences are that this machine has been developed to transfer content directly to iPod Nanos, and iPod Classics (but not iPhones or iPod Touch players), PSPs, or external memory.

In the case of the iPod or PSP, you never even need to have a computer get involved. It gets slightly more complicated in the case of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Content is recorded to an external memory, then transferred to the computer and to iTunes, where it is then transferred to the players.

And, in the case of other players, you’ll really get to test lots of utilities.

The transfer process itself really is a matter of pushing a button and walking away. Because it’s analog, you’re actually recording the program as it plays. It’s a dead simple way to get content from the PSP to another device to take recorded shows on the road.

As promised, recording to the iPod was a matter of plugging in the component cables in the back of the PVR (DirecTV in this case) and connecting the Pinnacle Video Transfer to the iPod via USB. The interface is basic: happy blue lights when all is hooked up properly—blue lights on the top of the box to indicate that all is well on the TV side and a blue on the bottom to indicate that the media device is recognized. A mode button with its own three blue lights labeled let you choose good, better, best video quality. When recording, the lights turn to red to warn you not to disconnect anything. And when you stop, the three mode lights flash until all is well again and the indicator lights all turn blue again.

The hardest part was reading the 18-page instruction manual and doing what it said to do. In other words, a certain amount of time was wasted in just charging in and pushing buttons.

Content is saved in MPEG-4 H.264 and can be saved at up to 720x80/576 which, as we’ve observed plays natively on Apple’s players and the PSP. The Pinnacle recorder also recorded to an external hard drive very easily, of course.

Content was easily transferred to the P2 reviewed this issue using Samsung’s Media Studio. Creative also includes a media converter in its suite of utilities for its player. For some mysterious reason, Creative’s latest version of Media Source had to be downloaded in order to convert the content. But hey, if you’re going to start playing with toys and asking them to do stuff they never promised to be great at in the first place you should expect to give up an afternoon.

It was an afternoon well spent. In the case of the tiny iPod Nano, the video content looked great but then this isn’t the biggest screen in the world. Getting the content onto the iPhone wasn’t too difficult using given the inherent quirkiness of syncing the iPhone and iTunes on more than one machine. (Since we’re on the cusp of a firmware upgrade, there’s always the hope that this situation might improve.) There’s no conversion necessary at least and the content looked good.

It was also just fine after conversion on the P2 and, in both cases, the audio sync was good. As you might expect, the video quality was a tad soft on larger displays.

Pinnacle provides the conversion chart in the accompanying table to give an idea of relative file sizes in MPEG 4. It’s helpful, and in the case of the conversion to the P2 and Creative player, the sizes remained relatively consistent.

Here’s the bottom line. In the case of TV shows, you can rent digital episodes for $1.99. Movies can be rented for $3.99. So, is it worth your while to spring for the Pinnacle Video Transfer?

If you’re interested in transferring to a supported Apple iPod player or the Sony PSP, go ahead. The answer is why the heck not? It really is just about as easy as buying and downloading a show or movie. Since it’s analog, you can easily copy DVDs to take on the road. The sync process for the iPhone may well make springing for the $1.99 seem a better alternative. There’s just that much more overhead. (This does not apply if you’re under 24 years old. Of course you’ll go for the free content.)

If you’re going to be fussing with the conversion process, you might well figure its easier to just buy or rent the content.

And there’s a third usage model. If you’d like to offload movies and shows from your PVR to a big hard drive and then watch them at your leisure on the PC, transfer them as needed to a player, and take the content on vacation, this is a pretty nice option. By the way, Pinnacle recommends you record in Good or Better formats to play on the PC since content recorded in the Best format is interlaced and it’s not going to look so great. Alternatively, they suggest you use a player with de-interlacing functionality and they suggest the VLC Player, http://www.videolan.org.

This is a nice alternative for the traveler, families who are headed for a vacation home, or commuters. It provides a quick way to get content on a player or the PC so that no one ever has to miss a critical episode of anything.

This sort of device is what Pinnacle does best and has been doing for several product generations. The benefit of experience is obvious in the Pinnacle Video Transfer device.