Pinnacle USB-HDTV Receiver

Got a USB-HDTV receiver. Dinky little thing. The remote control that came with it is about the size of a Bic lighter. The actual unit is even smaller! Cost about $80, came with the IR remote that I just mentioned, a sub one meter antenna for receiving the ATSC signal (works for strong analog signals as well), a dongle for analog input (NTSC and S-Video), a little USB extension cable, a driver and player application CD, and what appears to be a lite version of the Pinnacle Studio v10 video editing software (haven't tried that yet).

My local PBS station is broadcasting 'old school' analog , SD, and HD (in widescreen format) signals. The analog and SD are showing the same programming while the HD is just fancy-shmancy stuff like operas and nature shows (more than that, but you get the idea). Here are a few screen captures to compare picture qualities; analog, SD, and HD respectively.

The system requirements stated on the package are just a little above my work laptops specs, especially for HD, but it does work. The analog and SD work great, the HD works as long as I kill all background processes and use the 'puter just to watch the HD signal. If I do anything else, the HD picture will go into slow-mo for a minute or two, and then the application becomes unresponsive (like Sushis GF ).

Specs on the package:

MS Windows XP with SP2 or Vista (32bit)
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz, Pentium M 1.3GHz, or AMD Athlon 64. (For HD - Pentium 4 2.8GHz, Pentium M 1.7GHz, or equiv AMD Athlon.
256MB (512MB recommended) with MS Windows XP, 512MB (1GB recommended) with Vista
USB 2.0
DirectX 9

Here's what I have and the resources shown in the task manager while viewing SD. HD increases the VideoControl process memory usage to almost 70MB with little to no change in the PMCLoader process. Wish I had more horsies under the hood, but other than that, I rate it 5 FF Thumbs Up