Customer Reviews

Plextor PX-TV402U-NA ConvertX PVR Personal Video Recorder for PC

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I was nervous about getting any converter after reading reviews of quite a few of them here. I have never done any video conversion or editing before, and I had about 2 days to transfer an analog videotape and clean it up for a work project.

The Plextor installed and ran perfectly under XP with absolutely no problems. Since I had the unit, I also took the opportunity to convert about 15 VHS tapes I had to DVD :) with no problems on any of them, even older ones. Specifically, I had no video or audio sync problems with anything, commercial or non-commercial origin. If I could give a separate rating to hardware, I'd give it a 5 and give the included software a 3.

Intervideo's WinDVD comes with the product and is generally usable, but has installation issues, at least one persistant bug even with the current update, and a generally non-intuitive interface (YMMV). Please note that, contrary to common practice, the product serial number contains the letter "O" and alphas *must* be in upper case. I couldn't get font size changes on title screens to stick--they looked right on author playback, but reverted to the default (huge) size when the DVD was actually recorded. Otherwise, most basic stuff appears to be there if you click around, and the help isn't bad.

Completely met my needs. Thanks to prior reviewers for the info I needed to make my decision.

Still embarking on spooling off all the Hi-8 tapes I have, but I've been VERY satisfied with the Plextor unit so far. First thing I did was to spool one Hi-8 tape and then make a DVD, using the functionality of the bundled WinDVD Creator software. Good news: it worked, and a few hours after I started, I was watching the DVD I created, on my bedroom DVD player. Bad news: the software is full of minor and sometimes more than minor annoyances. It may be that I'm still climbing the learning curve with it, but I think it's just not very good. I'm looking into other solutions, such as Pinnacle, Adobe Premiere Elements, etc. Meanwhile, I keep spooling.

I haven't yet tried the TV capture in any depth. It looked like it worked, but again, with some annoyances on the software side. Plextor could improve this offering vastly with the addition of some better bundled software.

I was seeking a fairly inexpensive method of doing it all with video capture: getting cable televsion, VHS tape, and old DVD footage into the computer. After some tweaking and playing, I've successfully accomplished all of the above using this products' HW and SW package. Although DivX is the best format for recording off of cable TV, remember its 4 GB file-size limitation. The biggest concern for most home video editors is the ability to edit your footage in the common editing software applications. So far, I've not been able to edit my VHS-now-PC-(MPEG 2 & 4)footage in Pinnacle 7, but I'm hearing it might be possible in Adobe Premiere and Pinnacle 10.
Nevetheless, the product works, and has proven itself reliable.

The hardware is very good. Software is easy a bit buggy and leaves room for more control. I can watch TV on my computer with the USB2 connection and capture like a VCR. I can capture 3 hours of video input on a DVD with OK quality. With the best quality of capture to DVD directly - you can fill two hours on one layer DVD - much better than I as able to do with my JVC camcorder software.

I have been looking at these capture units for a while. I have only used one before this. [Dazzle] As mentioned before the Ulead software is a flop. I'm using Easy Media Creator 8. My DVD 8 sees the capture unit, and works great with it.
One little quirk is that there can be nothing else USB plugged in while the unit works. It will not work on a hub. But I can work around that. I have had no audio sync problems and the video quality is as good as the tapes I have been feeding in. I have noticed that if I feed in more than two tapes at a time however the size of the output file often exceeds 5-6 gig. This for a 100 minute tape seems excessive. I can restart the computer and do it over and the output file will fit a DVD-R5 disk. Someone smarter than I will have to figure that out.
Overall this was money well spent and I would do it again.

I was disappointed with some things:

1) MPEG-1 streams are not VCD compliant. So in using the tv402u to capture to an mpeg-1 file, you end up with something that must be re-rendered before burning to a VCD because it has a variable bitrate averaging 716 kbps, when it should have a CBR of 1500 kpbs. Rerendering knocks the quality down a notch, and makes it pointless to use the mpeg-1 capture feature in the first place. They might as well have left the MPEG-1 capability out.

2) Occasionally video frames are dropped on a P4 that is compliant with the requirement specs. It's infrequent enough that it would almost go unnoticed, however, the bundled software is not good enough to drop the corrosponding audio frames, or to interpolate the missing video frames, so the video can get ahead of the audio, leaving you with something that's out of sync. Downloadable freeware will fix the sync, but that's no excuse for Plextor bundling tools that lack this capability.

3) So it has some advanced features, but it's missing the most basic feature that all cheap capture cards have: frame grabbing capability. So those who want to perform extensive editing are forced to capture in a lossy format and re-render. And considering the limitations of the MPEG-1 codec, it would be useful to at least have the ability to capture a raw stream.

4) The codecs can only be used to compress analog streams. It would be useful to be able to send a digital stream from the computer to the hardware codec to have it compressed external to the main cpu. This capability is not offered in the ConvertX.

5) No HDTV support.

6) This may be nit-picky, but the included WinDVR tool has an irritating bug that creeps up on you. That is, when you select a program to record from your browser (Firefox or IE), it will schedule the recording, but it will record nothing. It's not obvious what the problem is, and took me some time to figure out what's broken, and how to remedy it. The scheduling feature only works if you select it from WinDVR's internal browser. There's also a WinDVR bug such that scheduling a recording via the composite input fails because the TV channel field (which is grayed out because the tuner is not used) was randomly set to a channel that is out of range.

I'd like to mention some positive points:

1) DivX!

2) External USB is a magnificent way to design this type of product. Most competing products use lame internal designs, and more vulnerable to EMF. This USB box is easy to install, the ports are very accessible, and it's simple to hotplug it from one computer to another.

3) The linux community is (unofficially) supporting this hardware. So some of the software shortcomings can be overcome by using (GNU) MythTV.

This works with my Ubuntu 7.1 P.C. GREAT!!!
I wanted a way to record my favorite TV show to my hard-drive while I was at work.
TiVo would do this but not to my hard-drive. This worked GREAT and still does!!
It is extremely difficult to find anything that works on *INX that will do this. BTW I am also burning all of my old VCR tapes to my iTunes folder and now can take them with me. I thought I was going to have to re-purchase or worse yet destroy all of my VCR tapes. Now, I can watch my old favorites without adding yet another large piece of hardware to my Television Center. Also, with the ConvertX 402U I can now add my Video from my hand held without any problems. The quality from my camcorder is really good with both audio and video. If you have a LINUX box and are looking for a great way to capture any type of video I would highly recommend the Plextor PX-TV402U in Ubuntu Linux especially Gutsy.

Set up went without incident. ULead software (now included) was powerful and easy to follow. Created a dvd from a VHS tape in 2 hours. No complaints. Highly recommended.

I bought this device 6 years ago and have never had one single issue with it. The software is buggy though. Plextor does provide a small program "Go Cap" that simply does a capture for you. Either will capture for you. WinDVD Creator version provided was custom made for this device. There are some features that are blanked out intentionally. Others reviewing here have not given the device due credit due to software issues. Use it for the capture and get another software to do your editing and disk production. Virtual Dub is an open source program that works with this quite well. I use DVD Author Pro v2.0 to make my DVDs. I love mine!

My system is a home built P4 3.2 with RAM 4gb. I use a WD Raptor drive for the speed and another high capacity drive for the captures. I started with Win2000 and changed to XP Pro. It worked well with both. You need a bit of tech know-how to do ANY video capturing. Check out the web forums to find the gurus in this field. Chances are your issue has already been resolved by others.

The best asset this machine has is the capacity to capture and encode video outside your PC. By the time it gets to your USB port all the 'hard' processor work has been done so that frees up your system for other things. I like the different formats you can encode to (MPEG1,2,4 and DivX). I also like all the input holes (SVHS,RCA,Co-ax). Your PC turns off the device when it shuts down and turns it on when you boot.

I recommend getting a GOOD VCR. Garbage in produces garbage out. Auto tracking would help you a LOT. I used this to convert all my home movies from VHS to DVD. I've converted 2,500+ movies (seriously) with this one device and it is still going strong! My best friend is looking for one as well> I will recommend she buy this device.

They make an expensive product and it is permanently incompatible with the upcoming OS upgrade and their response to customers is essentially "tough luck." This box is now obsolete after hardly being used and not so much as an significant upgrade discount offered.