Customer Reviews

Adaptec ADAPTC VIDEOH DVD MEDIA-CENTER 2310 USB KIT ( 2042900 )

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

i would give this zero stars if that were allowed. i use a winxp machine, 512rdram, 2.4 ghz, almost vacant 80gb hard drive,400mb bus. software is horrible. sometimes freezes my computer when trying to capture analog. bungled (not bundled) software windvr3 did not work with the included remote until i downloaded a plugin. tv channels take several seconds to change. if i change channels like a normal person "3-4-5..." my "puter freezes. I must...change...channels...slowly...zzzzzz.
i purchased this product based on reviews at a well respected computer (pc) product review site that also publishes a similar real world magazine. for the past 5 years, i've had very good experience with products recommended from unsaid site. this is the 1st dud and boy is it.
in all fairness i have not tried the SONIC software bundled with the VIDEOH DVD MEDIA CENTER. Just the bad, very bad WINDVR3 bungled in the box.
I wanted software and hardware to capture and author analog video from old 8mm tape and vcr tape. at the rate this is going i definitely gotta get some better software that doesn't cost hundreds of dollars and requires loads of time debugging. Geez, i even had a hard time registering this crap so i could try to get fixes. you would be wise, to steer wide of intervideo windvr, probably anything from intervideo. do yourself a big favor...pinch your nose and walk quickly past this stinker!

..I had checked the other reviews here first before buying it in a brick and mortar store. Install was flawless. But it would never capture video from either of two 8mm video recorders (to either DVD-R or the hard drive). Each attempt to capture either never started, or froze shortly after, or simply locked up my machine. This was working on a new machine with a fast processor, a ton of ram and a buttload of available hard drive space. Not ready for prime, and surely not worth the best part of two $100 bills. Adaptec products (at least their PCI-based ones, which I've used in the past) are usually decent. But this is device is simply a stinker. Avoid!

I've had this product for about 2 months now. I use it solely for watching television on my laptop, so I haven't explored the bundled video-editing software, and can't comment on that.

My impression is similar to that described in some of the other reviews on Amazon, but I can sum it up by saying that the device itself is functional and works as I expected. It's the bundled software that stinks, and it's just as bad as one of the other reviewers suggested. Intervideo WINDVR 3.0 comes with the Adaptec Videoh, and it's what you use for viewing, and recording, live television. It often has a tendency to hang for no apparent reason, and then when you try to use the "Windows Task Manager" to shut it down, it doesn't work.. 5 minutes later, the computer goes to the dreaded blue screen, completely out of the blue (so to speak). And I'm running this on a new laptop (1300 Ghz Centrino, 256, 80 gig, etc.). The Windvr software crashes the whole system almost on a daily basis.

You can't trust the scheduling software, and one of the most serious design defects I've encountered is the fact that Windvr will stop recording when it reaches the 4 gigabytes limit for the individual file it's recording - in other words, slightly more than an hour's worth of recorded material. Imagine that you've paused a live broadcast of a movie you've been wanting to see.. after about half-an-hour of recording, you come back to press play. Everything is fine for another half-hour, when you notice that Windvr is no longer recording the live feed.. the "delay time" (indicating how much recorded material you have left to watch) keeps getting smaller, when it should remain the same. You reach the end of the recorded portion of the movie and the screen pauses.. you have to hit "stop" - so that you're now viewing the live feed - and by now the movie has gone off the air and they're broadcasting something else.
I've missed more movie endings, and more exciting finishes to sports events in this way, you'd think they would have released an update for this obvious flaw.

Think again. A quick survey of the Intervideo website reveals that they have *never* issued any sort of update to this software, and evidently don't intend to - there is truly no support. Why Adaptec chose this particular software to bundle with their product, I'll never know.

I am told that other software is compatible with the Adaptec Videoh, including the "Personal Video Station" software (which for some reason wouldn't install on my machine). At any rate, the added software will probably set you back an additional $100 or so - but it sounds like it does have the advantage of being more functional, at least.

This product has been a terrible disappointment. After lots of USB driver issues during setup, I've got the unit to run at a basic level... but the scheduling software just does not work. I tried several times to record shows on a weekly schedule, but it just doesn't work. I'm reduced to entering each recording manually (a fairly tedious process that runs across several screens), but about 30% of the time the scheduling service crashes and misses the show (nothing gets recorded until I reboot). There have been no driver updates since July.

In addition, the "electronic programming guide" is actually a web page, and the only way in which it's integrated with the program -- the ability to record a show by clicking on it in the browser -- doesn't work at all (I get a dialog that says "Load Fail" most of the time).

Unfortunately, this product is worthless due to fatal technical problems. I wouldn't under any circumstances recommend it. Haven't tried any of the other brands yet...

I have owned this for 4 wks now and have already converted 2 (120 minute) 8mm tapes. Capture went flawlessly and am pleased with it. Hookup/Installation is very easy. BTW, I've a P4 2.8C based PC attached to this product. You'll need a high powered PC to do editing (not for capture since the device already has a MPEG encoder)

I was at a fork in the road between this USB Media Center unit and a similar USB setup by Pinnacle. I did some reading about the product before I purchased and decided on this one for I was concerned about the capture quality. I also was fully aware of some of the bumps in the road experienced with this product, well the software. The InterVideo WinDVR program installed fine and works pretty well. The capture quality is good and variable settings is sufficient for my needs. I like the time shift feature. The Sonic MyDVD program is another issue. When I installed it and went through a routine reboot, I noticed that the two optical drives were not working or acccessible at all. BIOS was registering the drives fine but the Device Manager placed exclaimations next to both drives and also my Iomega ZIP 250MB drive, claiming that there was a definite problem. What one needs to do is follow the instructions to edit the registry files which were defined as "lower filters" for me. That got the optical drives back. I reinstalled the ZIP driver and got that drive back fine. The operation within the MyDVD program is easy to use and never has crashed or locked up on me, same for the WinDVR program. The next problem to arise was the inability to press the burn button (greyed out). One has to go to the Sonic website and download the appropriate Record Engine update. This enabled me to burn my first 1 hour DVD and it was exciting to see it play on a regular player! (took 90 minutes for the burn but that could be my setup). One should note that there's a slight ripple bar that shows up on the bottom of the video upon capture and editing. The finished DVD product however WHEN SHOWN THORUGH A CONVENTIONAL TV will be fine, as the image is cropped in a little bit (completely normal differences between a TV and computer monitor). I should add that I did at one time have a problem with the audio/video sync. I was capturing from a VCR on a tape that had some rough spots on it. This tends to upset things. I happen to have two hard drives on my PC and decided to use the second drive to capture. This does help, and it also helps to have a system that's properly updated, free of ad/spy/virusware etc. My system is about 20 months old, an HP Pavilion 775y with 3.06 HT Pentium 4, 200GB Seagate HDD, and 180 Maxtor HDD, 1GB RAM. Also sometimes it depended on how I started the process of recording a VHS tape. What seems to work for me is to get the tape ready to go in the VCR, press the record button WinDVR wait about 3 secs and then press play on the VCR. I managed to capture my 1 hour show with some rough spots in it with absolutely no sync out problems.
I will decide to give this product a 3 since I had to swim through a lot of technical muck to get it to work beautifully. If you're the type that has used utility programs, updated drivers, installed new equipement, and played mind bending problem solving games like the whole MYST series then this product should be approachable to you. I'm happy now with it.

I regret having this device for video capture purposes. After about 20 minutes, the audio gets out of sync w/ video. Gets worse the longer the capture. I have a new IBM ThinkCenter w/ 512 meg RAM.

Consider yourselves warned.

I had a lot of fun trying the many many features of this great product for a week.

I had to return it though because it simply couldn't lock onto my cable tv channels. Without the TV capabilities, it wasn't worth the price. It worked fine at my parent's house - they have a different cable tv provider.

I'm going to try Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe next - it's not as good but hopefully it will be compatible with my cable tv provider.

The software that is bundled windvr which I found to be full of bugs,
Too bad though because the hardware looks pretty good as far as quality for this device's hardware

When I first tried to capture the audio and video of a VHS
tape I experienced a great deal of radio interference. Upon
advice from Adaptec to use shielded cables with filters and
that solved the problem.
I haveconverted more than 50 VHS tapes to DVD without any
problem whatsoever.
The editing process could be a little less complicated
but beyond that it does exacly what I wanted it to do.

Max E. Grubb