Rating: 
Summary: YOU GOTTA BE SAVVY!
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: If I could score it lower, I would: and wish.....
Review: ..I had checked the other reviews here first before buying it in a brick and mortar store. Install was flawless. But it would capture video from neither 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!
Rating:
Summary: ADAPTC VIDEOH DVD MEDIA-CENTER 2310 USB KIT sucks
Review: ..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 neither 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!
Rating:
Summary: Waste of money
Review: For reference, this product is only different from Videoh!DVD by the presense of TV Tuner, the rest is identical (and seems to be identical on the hardware level). So it's all applicable to that product too.
I really did not got so far as to try the TV tuner, I was completely set off by this product when trying video capture. My computer is three times faster and has four times more memory than the minimum declared as necessary for this product, and, of course, I use USB 2.0, and still less than a minute of capturing video with minimal settings resulted in blinking orange LED meaning ERROR. In fact, I even did not had to capture video, just gettign to capture screen without actual capturing (no copying to disk) resulted in the same problem.
As I understand from my observations, this piece of hardware just was not able to really encode video stream in real time. Granted, I used somewhat noisy tape which is a challenge for compressing/encoding, but is not that what you'd like to have video capture for -- to archive old family videos?
And for TV, well, may be you will have some functionality, but with getting accustomed with it and usingwidely, you'll quickly get the same level of frustration, that I had. Don't waste your money on this junk.
Rating: 
Summary: Digital Media User
Review: Having recently bought adaptec's "Media-Center", I have found it somewhat difficult to work with and disapointing. Several problems are evident when trying to record from TV feed as mentioned in some of the reviews for this product. As if that wasn't enough of a problem , I also found out after contacting customer service that one can ONLY use the device w/ the two provided applications that come bundled with the package. Indeed very limited in my opinion especially for such an expensive device. For all parties interested: I suggest just using a firewire/i.link cable if camcorder/camera supports it. Windows automatically and usually detects your device. Also, there are cheaper capture devices if all you need is to capture from a device except TV. As far as software, I've found that windows movie maker is a lot easier to work with and it worked best for my case. Good luck to all of you on your purchase!
Rating:
Summary: Digital Media User
Review: Having recently bought adaptec's "Media-Center", I have found it somewhat difficult to work with and disapointing. Several problems are evident when trying to record from TV feed as mentioned in some of the reviews for this product. As if that wasn't enough of a problem , I also found out after contacting customer service that one can ONLY use the device w/ the two provided applications that come bundled with the package. Indeed very limited in my opinion especially for such an expensive device. For all parties interested: I suggest just using a firewire/i.link cable if camcorder/camera supports it. Windows automatically and usually detects your device. Also, there are cheaper capture devices if all you need is to capture from a device except TV. As far as software, I've found that windows movie maker is a lot easier to work with and it worked best for my case. Good luck to all of you on your purchase!
Rating:
Summary: DON'T BUY THIS! A RIP-OFF!
Review: I can't tell you the frustration I have had using this product. After a few months, it stopped working with any consistency. In the middle of burning dvds, it freezes up and just stops burning, with no explanation. I have wasted about 50 dvds trying tho burn them unsuccessfully. ADAPTEC support is horrible...after three months, they charge $45.00 plus per hour to give any help. This is the worst product I have ever bought, from the most greedy, unhelpful company. I called customer service to complain, and they didn't seem to care at all if their customers are dissatisfied. A real shame.
I hesitated to give it 1 star, as it deserves 0.
A real rip-off.
Rating:
Summary: Great product - not compatible with my cable tv provider
Review: 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. Regards,
Karen
Rating:
Summary: Could be better
Review: I have a laptop and I'll be using my new Adaptec VideOH most to watch TV and schedule recordings.
I was 90% satisfied with this card when I first installed. The CD that came with the card was bad. Couldn't read well on my laptop. I had to copy the files from the CD using another computer, in which the CD also didn't read well but after a while it copied all the files. From there on it installed everything perfectly well. It comes with WinDVR 3, which was, at that point, amazing. It does have amazing features. You can press PAUSE on the TV, go out to eat, then come back and continue watching, even skipping the comercials. Very nice! Works all the time. The recording quality is amazing. I couldn't tell the difference from the original. The picture quality of the card is out of this world. No USB problems at all, on my XP. The Program Guide is also very nice, despite the fact it is just a webpage. But it works. You can use the webpage as part of the program. They talk to each other, so you can schedule a recording of a show, schedule a reminder, and so on from that page.
Now the bad, VERY BAD things:
Your first record scheduling experiences might be very frustrating! You will see that the WinDVR schedule DOES NOT WORK AT ALL! Go ahead and schedule as much as you want. Waste your time. That unless you're part of the few who does not use the "automatically adjust clock for daylight saving" in the Windows clock setup menu, with which selected the schedule do not work. The worst part is that Intervideo's support page does not even mention a problem on the scheduling of WinDVR. In a matter of fact, their support page does not mention anything useful at all! Going to Adaptec's webpage, just a quick search on their knowledge base is enough to find the solution for that.
Another problem: I keep losing my channel setup everytime I restart my PC. I almost never restart, only standby or hybernate, and its also possible to save and load the channel setup, but that's another annoying little thing WinDVR has.
Now a bad thing about the Adaptec card itself: changing channels takes about a second to take place. So if you want to go from CNN to Cartoon Network, you better remember the channel number. Honestly, computer troubleshooting is not for me. Intervideo made a software with clear, aparent bugs, didn't published them on the support page, and Adaptec shipped that software along with their card without any advise about those problems either inside or outside the box. I did a little research and found out that those bugs exists since at least October/03. No fixes at all as of today Dec 24/03! How come lots of people including myself found those bugs in the first day as I've seen in many foruns, and Adaptec/Intervideo, specially Intervideo, didn't find 'em? Or didn't fix 'em? Neither advised about 'em? Now, why should it be me to enjoy my holiday finding a solution for those bugs? Both of those companies get my 1 STAR review. Because I bought one of the most expensive TV cards out there, and still it gave me headaches. And because they could have just printed on the manual: turn off the daylight savings until we fix the problem. But I'm now very satisfied with both the hardware and software. It's out of this world all the features and options, specially the image quality. And I will give it the best of my recommendations, in the future.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent video capture
Review: 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)
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