Installation on Windows 7 Home Premium

First of all, do not use the installation disk!  It doesn’t have the drivers for Windows 7.

PCTV recommends that you install their TVcenter software, but I haven’t heard great things about it and they seem to be pushing some monthly subscription with it.  I’ve used Windows Media Center before it’s a very solid program for watching and recording TV, so I skipped on the TVcenter. By the way, the remote doesn’t work with the installation instructions I’m giving you. That said, if you want to use the remote, you probably need to install TVcenter, like if you’re using a HTPC.

Anyways, here’s the link to the drivers: http://www.pctvsystems.com/tabid/62/default.aspx/Downloads/Driver/tabid/123/language/en-US/Default.aspx

If the link goes bad, try going to PCTV’s website and navigating to Support > Downloads > Drivers: http://www.pctvsystems.com

Download the appropriate driver, and then unzip it on your hard drive.  Make sure you remember where you saved it!

Now you can plug in your little USB dongle.  There will be a prompt that says installation has failed.

So to install the driver go to your Start Menu > Control Panel > Under Hardware and Sound click on View Devices and Printers

You’ll see this menu pop-up:

Right-click on PCTV 80e > Properties > Hardware Tab > Properties > Change Settings button > Driver Tab

Now click on Update Driver.  Then the box below pops up:

Click on Browse my computer for driver software and then point the installer to where you unzipped the drivers.  Whether your computer is running the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows, make sure you select the right folder, so that the installation doesn’t accidentally get messed up.

Now it should be installed, and you can fire up Windows Media Center (it should be included on most Windows 7 computers)

Right to left: Over the air antenna, adapter to plug in a cable plug, the usb adapter.

Video/TV Quality

Once Windows Media Center opened, it went through some pretty easy to understand installation steps and auto searched for TV channels on top of adding the TV guide for all of those channels.  It was a very painless process, and I ended up with reception for about 35 channels–granted 1/3 were in Spanish and 1/3 were religious.  The first channel took like about 30 seconds to load, but every other channel after that loaded pretty quickly.

Here’s a screen cap from part of a TV show I recorded.  This is just to give you an idea of the quality of the video that the PCTV HD mini stick can handle.  It was broadcast over the air in HD, and it recorded beautifully.  It was pretty much an exact copy of the live TV, which is a lot better than some of the TV tuners I’ve owned in the past. The only downside is that the video file that Windows Media Center records is gigantic. Seriously, I was just testing the recording ability, and 3 minutes was 900 megabytes.

I also uploaded a short video clip that was transcoded from the WTV file format to an MP4 video.  By the way, I used MediaCoder, which was a very easy way to transcode the WTV file into something smaller and easier to share. The video quality degraded a little bit because I didn’t want to make you all download a 900 mb file.  Just remember that the original was a tad bit better.

Recorded Video from PCTV HD mini stick 80e (30mb, 3 minutes)

Conclusion

the PCTV HD mini stick 80e was $30 at Newegg when I bought it.  So for the price, I would definitely recommend this TV tuner.  Installation wasn’t a breeze, but I got it to work pretty quickly–even if it wasn’t the most straight forward process.  The video and audio quality is good, and it’s pretty affordable.  I think that I can put off purchasing a new TV for a couple more months, which for me makes this $30 investment more than worth it.