Pinnacle Studio PCTV USB PAL useful?

[bakerie]

I found this device on eBay and thought I'd give it a whirl.
A look around the forum and I can only find one guy talking about getting drivers working on it.
Is there any consensus on the quality of this thing?

Here's what it looks like in person (very unusual design!):

IMG_20260125_030445.jpg

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[bakerie]

I did manage to find some absolutely ancient info on this through half broken websites. Supposedly it's limited to 352x240 capture! I couldn't find 64 bit drivers either, so it's a paper weight to me. I'll throw it on market place and see if someone wants it as a curiosity.

[latreche34]

The resolution limitation could be in the MPEG-2 chip or the driver, I don't think the ADC chip is limited 352x240, there is no such standard. Someone with Linux and ffmpeg can spit out its guts but if hardware locked to MPEG-2 at that resolution it is really useless.

From this datasheet, it looks as such.

[bakerie]

352x240 for NTSC and 352x288 for PAL are standards are they not? They're what we used for VCDs back in the day.

I have to imagine it's just capturing one field of the interlaced data as a way to get frames over USB 1.1 with no de-interlacing needed.

Not sure if it's hardware locked to that, but being USB 1.1, you're not getting uncompressed video from it at full resolution.

If I had a bit of spare time, I'd fire up my XP machine and connect it, but my schedule is just too full. That's why I put it up for free on the market place. Hopefully someone with the time to explore will document it.

The best result would be that it has MJPEG on board, but given the specs of PCs at the time, doing hardware MPEG compression was probably the only real option as post processing on a PC would be too slow.

EDIT: You can force windows 10 to accept drivers as well. It's possible that something that used the same chipset has a compatible driver.

EDIT2: It has onboard compression specifically designed for transmitting video over USB 1.1, that's the Nogatech chip. If I find a proper dataheet I'll link it here too.

Quote:

The NT1003 was the first chip in this family. When literature on the product emerged in 1997, the NT1003 was originally referred to as the Live Video On USB chip. However, that label soon disappeared from company use and the chip was rebranded as the USB-Vision. By the eventual time of product availability, in late 1998, it had subsequently become known more simply as the USBVision (or USBvision). The NT1003 was intended for use in digital video cameras; where in such use, the chip's algorithms provide compression of the raw 30fps video data down to data rates between the ranges of 0.5 Mbit to 8 Mbit, and thus permit the transmission of a video stream across the narrow bandwidth of an USB 1.1 channel.

http://www.staroceans.org/DC/HWBooks...r12/nt1003.pdf

Datasheet shows that the Nogatech is indeed the limitation:

Quote:

Up to 30 frames/sec @ CIF size (352x288 pixels)

[latreche34]

They are standard video resolutions in compressed formats, not in analog to digital conversion governed by rec.601, In fact the ADC chip SAA7111A datasheet is fully capable of 720 for both 525 and 625 standards, Take a look.

[lordsmurf]

Junk, worthless.
Also 98-XP only, 32-bit only.

EDIT: You'd better closely verify Win10. A lot of things "install", but have various errors in usage. For example, ATI 600 USB post-7 installs. It may "install", but never works correctly. Same for AIW post-XP.

[latreche34]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bakerie

It has onboard compression specifically designed for transmitting video over USB 1.1, that's the Nogatech chip. If I find a proper dataheet I'll link it here too.

Yes, I posted that datasheet link in post 3.

[bakerie]

Quote:

Originally Posted by latreche34

Yes, I posted that datasheet link in post 3.

I missed that line in your post, sorry! I think my brain thought that was a signature and ignored it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by LordSmur

EDIT: You'd better closely verify Win10. A lot of things "install", but have various errors in usage. For example, ATI 600 USB post-7 installs. It may "install", but never works correctly. Same for AIW post-XP.

Might not have worded my post clearly. I just meant that since 32 bit drivers exist for it, you *can* force install them to 32 bit windows 10, not that they would work.

I'm also unable to verify this, but any of the drivers I can find based around this mention 32 bit Vista.

If anyone wants to make sure they can actually run it, they would of course need something like an XP/98 machine.