Black Boxes: Pinnacle Bungee DVD Recorder

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by D. Eric Franks
Winter 2002/Spring 2003

COMPANY: Pinnacle Systems
CONTACT: (650) 526-1600
WEB SITE: www.pinnaclesys.com
PRICE: $200

Personal video recorders (PVRs) like TiVo and ReplayTV are nothing more than hard drive recorders controlled by a small computer and sophisticated software program guides. With a screwdriver and a bit of geek know-how, you can make a home built PVR in a just a few hours. For those of us who steer clear of messing around inside of the computer, there are now a few external devices that plug-and-play into USB ports. Pinnacle's Bungee DVD is one of those products. It offers easy installation, simple video recording capabilities and basic PVR time shifting functions.

Out of the Box
Installing the Bungee DVD took just a few minutes, since we only needed to unpack it, plug it in and connect it to our PC via a USB port. One serious limitation, however, is that it requires either a Windows Me or XP computer. We were up and running on a Windows Me computer with no glitches 10 minutes after we broke the shrink-wrap on the box. We also tried to install it on a standard Intel P4 Windows XP machine, but experienced a hardware connection problem with the USB ports. Other devices worked fine in these same ports and, conversely, no other machines in the lab had any trouble detecting the Bungee DVD over their USB ports. Windows XP did tell us that the software had not had its XP compatibility "verified," (many, many applications still do this as of this writing, since WinXP is still relatively new) although software installation was otherwise smooth.

We connected our standard cable television cable to the back of the Bungee DVD and then clicked a button in the software to switch to the cable input. The internal tuner on the Bungee DVD and software automatically and quickly scanned through the channels to find the active ones in our market. The Bungee DVD does not have any outputs, so unless you have additional hardware, you must view the video on your computer monitor. We also hooked up a camcorder to the S-video input. The quality of the video and audio was excellent for computer-based television watching. When we watched the live output from the camcorder, we noticed that the view on the computer was delayed by a little over a second. This is not a flaw and was quite entertaining for about 10 minutes. While it isn't exactly the intended use of this product, pausing reality (i.e. time shifting) as viewed through a live camcorder feed was quite fun and gave us all kinds of ideas for truly horrible performance art pieces.

The internal TV tuner made the Bungee more than just a passive capture device. The software was a bit sluggish and took a second or so to move from one channel to the next. The Bungee has basic PVR features, such as time shifting and scheduled recording. Time shifting worked well and allowed us to pause live TV. As with any PVR, even TiVo or ReplayTV, time shifting takes a little getting used to, and it is fairly easy to get a bit bewildered about what you are watching (e.g. Is what you are watching actually on TV this minute?). The Bungee DVD software handles this with a playback bar that gradually fills up with negative minutes, indicating how far from real time you are. This, in turn, allowed us to manually skip commercials; fast-forwarding through shows using configurable Jump buttons, which jumped forward through negative time towards zero (live TV). It's really much easier to use than this explanation implies.

The Bungee's interface was simple to use. The software allowed us to schedule shows for recording. This was done almost completely manually and without a fancy program guide. It wasn't as easy as clicking on a show listing in an interactive guide, but the process for scheduling a show for recording was actually much easier than programming a VCR.

We next tested the Bungee's video capture features. The Bungee DVD breakout box is a hardware device that does all of the signal conversion to MPEG-2 internally before the video ever arrives in the computer. This results in very fast encoding and, since the video is pre-processed and compressed, is what allows the video to be transferred over the relatively data-rate-narrow USB pipeline. We could configure the system to capture in a DVD-ready format (MPEG-2 with 740x480 screen resolution at a variety of constant bitrates) or an SVCD-ready format (MPEG-2 at 480x480). We initially captured a short taped segment from a camcorder to test the function in DVD-ready mode. To record, we simply clicked the Record button while viewing the source. To stop recording, we clicked the Stop button. The PCTV Vision software saved recorded clips to a bin with a thumbnail image of the first frame. During one of our tests, the audio became seriously out of sync with the video about 30 minutes into a recorded program. This happened early in the testing and may have been a result of excessive time shifting/unshifting while recording and experimenting. In any case, we were unable to reproduce the problem later.

Burn
The last function we tested was the ability to immortalize our TV viewing by burning CDs and DVDs. The simple software let us select recorded movies, add them to a file list and then click the Burn button. We used a Panasonic DVR-A03 drive and Verbatim DVD-R media as well as generic blank CD-Rs (for VCD and SVCD). The quality was good when compared with other MPEG-2 recorded video we have viewed on a PC. The discs we burned were compatible with all newer (less than a year and a half old) DVD players that we tested and the quality of the highest-quality DVD video was indistinguishable from the original programming. In fact, in our opinion, the DVD-burned discs looked better than the original, since we watched the DVD copy on a television set and not on a computer screen. This test emphasizes that the Bungee DVD is a computer-centric product and is not necessarily a replacement for a stand-alone living room PVR.

Bungee Leap
The only thing we missed in this product was television out ports (which, while tantalizingly labeled on the plastic back of the Bungee DVD, were not associated with any hardware). The Bungee DVD is clearly a no frills, no hassles product. We loved the simple, but powerful features and the true plug-and-play no-screwdriver installation, despite our anecdotal USB hardware compatibility problem with one machine. The audio sync issue worried us, but appears to be a random and rare bug. If you don't mind watching television and movies on your computer monitor, the Bungee DVD turns your computer into a no-frills hard disc and DVD PVR.

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