RE: Pinnacle ShowCenter

["Tony Butler" <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I bought one a couple of months ago, but have only now added it to node0.
Lack of time/laziness aside, it hasn't really been up to the rigours of
SWMBO testing till now - and even now, is still not there yet.

The latest 1.4 beta of the showcenter software makes it more usable and a
bit faster - you should browse around the SC forums for an idea of the sort
of problems people have been having - video stuttering, pictures not
showing
etc, as well as the lack of features you expect to be present, eg:
- down mixing of 5.1 sound to stereo out - they are working on this at the
moment, but don't have a release date.
This means I have to encode two audio tracks - the "proper" one
for when
*I* am watching something, routing through an AV amp,
and a stereo audio one   for when SWMBO is watching thru the TV alone.
This in itself presents problems (space aside) where
switching tracks can cause it to freeze.
- The blurb tells you it will play back DVD VOB files.  Those not 100%
au-fait with the terminology might think this means it
can play a DVD, menus and all.  It can't.  It can play the raw video files
extracted from a DVD, but no menus, no way to
choose a track order, nada.
- Organisation of files is very shallow - eg for video, it's Genre\Title
and
that's it - no sub-genres, no multiple genres etc.

I know pinnacle are working on some of these, but it's taking time - and
there are other devices like the neuston that have some of these features,
or indeed open versions of the ShowCentre software offering them and/or
other stuff like streaming internet radio, web browsing etc.

For the money, it could be worth looking at a kiss dvd player maybe - some
of these do similar things AND play actual DVD's too!
Hell, look at a chipped xbox too - it's cheaper and a lot more versatile.
I have one but it's not "fully functional" due to aforementioned
time
constraints etc - hence I bought the SC as an off-the-shelf solution.

I'm sure given another 6 months, the SC will be about right -and 6 months
after that, V2 will be released and will address various hardware
limitations of the current one, but until then I think for your 200 quid,
you might be a little disappointed.


Cheers,

Tony
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Daykin [mailto:simons.lists@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 21 March 2004 12:23
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: [ukha_d] Pinnacle ShowCenter
>
> Hi,
>
> Has anyone had much experience of the Pinnacle ShowCenter?  I
> am a big user of J-River Media Center and am looking for ways
> of interfacing it to my AV system.  This seems quite
> interesting,  got good Video playback capabilities?  Anyone
> used it?  Any comments?  Any serious competitors, especially
> in the Video Arena?
>
> Specially, I am looking for something that can play back
> large (e.g. ~2G) DivX encoded video files over the network.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Simon
>
>
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