Pinnacle Movie Box USB chipsets?

[dpalomaki]

This is not intended as a recommendation for the device. It is to provide some more information about it's internals. I opened one up, marked Rev. 1

The interior board is labeled for the Movie Box and Movie Box Plus, just the that DV (IEEE1394 port) is missing from the board. The ICs in the Pinnacle Movie Box USB include:

CIRRUS LOGIC CS92288-CB, MPEG Encoder/Decoder
CIRRUS LOGIC CS4954-CQ, NTSC/PAL DV-to-analog Encoder
Cypress CY7C68013, USB Controller
2 - ICS IC42S32200-6T, RAM (64 MBIT)
Philips SAA7115HL, Video Capture Device
24LC16B, 16 Kbit Serial EEPROM
Texan Instruments LC574A, Octal edge-triggered flip-flop
UDA1380TT, stereo audio coder-decoder (for MD, CD, MP3)
74LVC257AD, quad 2-input multiplexer

At least the case is nice, designed by F. A. Porsche!

Image of the board attached.

[lordsmurf]

Interesting, and yet not a suggested capture box.

[latreche34]

There are few Pinnacle boxes that are built in MPEG-2 encoder chip, You cannot capture lossless with those, I knew them back in the day but I forgot over the years.

It was a clever idea back then when MPEG-2 was the main video codec and computer CPU's were limited in power so they put the encoding task inside the capture device to reduce CPU usage. Now, it is not a feature that everyone wants.

So when getting a legacy capture device from big names like Pinnacle, Plextor ...etc watch out for that chip, The above card seem to be one of them.