Windows 7 TV Tuner - Pinnacle PCTV HD - Doesn't work well at all!

[CraigV]

It worked initially on Pinnacle's TVCenter Pro (ver. 4.9), then tanked after that. Media Center plays somewhat, but it's at a very choppy frame rate even though my system isn't nearly maxed. On top of that, and even primarily, Media Center doesn't recognize the digital tuner nor does TVCenter when it runs. Tried uninstalling the drivers to let W7 find it, still didn't work well. I've installed version 4.9 of TVCenter, then pack to 5.4 and it just seems to get worse.

The main crap of it all is that Pinnacle sold off it's tuner division and Hauppauge has it now so I'm not even sure if they'll updated the drivers again.

Any ideas??? Has anyone's Pinnacle TV tuner cards worked for them?

Windows 7100, 64 bit
AMD 5000+ x2 (oc'd to 3000)
Crucial 4 gb DDR2 800
AMD Gigabyte 780G mobo

 

[johansa]

Yes, I got the old legacy Pinnacle PCTV Rave working on Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, but I usually just use the amazing app "TV-Dscaler" to play Live TV. The main problem was getting a win7 driver for old cards like this. I was lucky to find some guy had actually made a 64bits driver version after googling it for a few weeks, (also had to enable test mode to get win7 to load it the unverified signed driver software, i'm working on a fix for that).

Software that works is always better than ones that don't.

 

[CraigV]

Thanks for the info... yeah it's been scary with the driver sets for the Pinnacle card. I installed and uninstalled in several times and eventually one of the driver sets has managed to work on it. Though, Media Center doesn't recognize the HDTV channels, which is strange. I'm not running it through a cable box, just a straight coax. It seems like MC only is able to go up to channel 185, even though the HDTV channels are in the low 200s. So it may recognize HDTV but the channels only go up so far. But that's icing if I were to get those, I'm just glad I got it to work so far.

 

[johansa]

In most cases MCE grabs the channel list from the downloaded TV Setup Guide and location config (if that is entered wrong, then you could be missing out on channels), but it's also possible to do a scan search for channels too. I have no idea what the maximum number is though.

Since you mentioned Digital and Analogue channels, I remember in "Vista MCE" a lot of people ran into trouble with hybrid TV tuner cards, wouldn't surprise me if something like that was buggy in Win7 (there were registry fixes and tweaks to get it working on Vista), but even more likely than that, it's a "driver problem". You can get TV tuner cards working using drivers that aren't made specifically for your card and thus not "100% compatible" with your hardware (a lot of tuners use some of the same chips and so forth).