Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

I first saw the Pinnacle Video Transfer at CES 2008, and I was immediately impressed by the product. A small, dedicated hardware-based h.264 video encoder with simple input and output? Sounds like a winner, right? It could have been, but it's missing a critical component. Let's start with what it can do, then get to what it can't do. It has inputs on one side: composite video and stereo audio. So right there we're talking about bottom-end input quality. But for most people, that falls into the "good enough" category, so it's not a huge problem. On the other end there's a USB 2.0 port that you connect a hard drive or USB Flash drive to. Even an iPod will work! The big button in the middle? You press the Mode part of the button to cycle through the quality modes: Good (320 x 240, 768 kbps h.264 video, 64 kbps audio), Better (640 x 480, 1.2 mbps h.264 video, 128 kbps audio), and Best (720 x 480, 1.5 h.264 mbps video, 192 kbps audio). When you want to start recording the video, you press the REC (record) part of the button. When you want to stop recording, you press it again. When it's finished writing the file to your storage device, it stops blinking. Simple, minimalist design. Sounds brilliant, right? Nope. Read more...