I took a chance on a piece of hardware that I did not know much about, but it has ended up being a great addition to our house this weekend. I've always wanted to get a
Slingbox to transcode anything that is located in our living room. During a recent
Woot, the
Pinnacle PCTV To Go HD Wireless showed up as a viable alternative to the
Slingbox.
I've always known that Pinnacle software is, uh, shall we say, not always the greatest in code quality, especially when it comes to Vista support. I took a chance on it because the PCTV To Go HD Wireless is merely a rebadged
Hava Wireless HD, without the TV tuner built-in. The device showed up on my doorstep this past Friday.
I spent Friday night unboxing and flashing the kernel to the latest release from Pinnacle's site, which as of right now is 180.151-64. Apparently the "-64" part indicates whether or not you have 32MB of flash or 64MB of flash. I ended up installing the client software on practically every PC in the house, which either runs XP SP3 32-bit or Vista SP1 32-bit. I couldn't get the video portion of the Hava software working on my Server 2008 64-bit install, but I wasn't expecting it to work.
Although it would have made a boring screenshot but a cool YouTube video, I was RDP'd into every system in the house from my PC and all of them were "watching TV" across our wireless infrastructure. No dropped frames. It was actually quite amazing. The five Buffalo APs in our house performed flawlessly.
There were 3 reasons I bought the device:
#1. I like watching TV after everyone else goes to sleep, but our living room TV is "loud" and can be heard practically everywhere in the house. With this transcoding whatever would normally be shown on our main TV, everyone else can sleep peacefully.
#2. The kids have PCs in their rooms but do not have any TVs. Some might consider this a good thing, but it would be nice if they could watch their recorded programs off the Dish PVR in their rooms. This is exactly what happened this weekend after I had everything installed. Sabrina and Juliana woke up to full screen TV streaming on their computer LCDs. The Saturday morning cartoons happened to be streaming at the time.
#3. When everyone is watching a DVD on the main TV, sometimes I want to watch something else in the living room. With the way I have things setup, the device streams whatever component output is coming out of the switcher box. This way, the kids and my wife can watch a DVD on the TV, and I can watch the Dish, either TV1 or TV2, or play the Xbox on my laptop full screen. Neat!
Things I've discovered over the weekend:
#1. Sabrina's PC stops streaming TV after a few hours due to a memory leak (I suspect) in her video card driver under XP. Her PC is the only XP PC left in the house, other than my Thinkpad 240. I just received a free copy of Vista Ultimate at the recent Server 2008 launch event, so her PC might be upgraded soon. I want to tap into the Media Center aspect of this device anyway.
#2. I'm having way too much fun with this thing. I had low expectations due to how much the price had been reduced from the original retail price, but it works great so far.
#3. It seems to stream
RTSP so you are not limited to the Hava/Pinnacle player program. It is also supported by
SageTV, which seems to provide much higher video quality than the included clients.
#4. The IR Blaster included works great with my Dish PVR. I can change channels from any PC.
Overall, I like it. If anyone out there has any other tips or tricks for this device, please let me know.