Diamond XtremeTV PVR600 (04/30/2005)

Review: My goal was to transfer the contents of video camera tapes to DVDs. I know I could have purchased an inexpensive PCI card to do this, but I dislike single tasking solutions. I opted for this unit because it also would allow me to have Tivo-like capabilities on my PC if I ever wanted them (I already have a Tivo which is light years ahead of anything I’ve seen on a PC). Also, an external device, I reasoned, would allow me the added flexibility of using the device on any of my computers, either at home or at work.

The PVR600 installed quite easily as did the Beyond TV, Beyond Media and Firefly remote software. The Beyond TV setup wizard came up and would have worked well, except that the authors never considered that maybe someone would want to set up the software to do what I wanted to do and not watch TV. I had not antenna or cable input – only a video camera input – so the wizard could not cope. I did the best I could and finished the wizard. What a surprise – I got no picture from my camera. I did get some “error messages” that made no sense – one of which was that Norton Internet Security needed to give full permissions to Beyond TV. I had done that, but the software continually insisted that it needed to be done anyway. I searched and searched and searched for answers, but gave up after a couple of hours and called Diamond’s “Tech Support”. The technician was obviously reading off of a script and, in response to any remotely challenging questions, would go off for 10 minutes at a time to ask someone else for an answer. Frustrating to say the least. I politely asked if I could just talk to whoever it was he was talking to, but this request was denied. Sigh. After about an hour, the technician gave me an undocumented, back-door method to set up a video camera input. This did work, but I still got the annoying error messages which he could not clear up. I also found it annoying that both Beyond TV and Firefly insisted on putting icons in the system tray on startup – since I was only going to be using the software occasionally, I certainly did not want these programs stealing computer resources constantly. Finally, the technician gave me an FTP site address so I could download a copy of TotalMedia which he said was better and easier than Beyond TV. I successfully downloaded and installed the software and was up and running perfectly within 10 minutes! It makes me wonder why on earth they decided to give crappy, buggy software in the package. It seems that everyone would be better served if they included TotalMedia in the first place. Well that was five hours of my life wasted that I’ll never get back.

Using the impressive TotalMedia software, I was able to easily transfer the contents of a tape to the computer and then burn it to DVD. Naturally, the transfer to the computer took 1.5 hours to copy a 1.5 hour recording. What was unexpected, however, was that the easy-to-use “Burn to DVD” feature would take about 2 hours to convert the file and then finally burn it to DVD. The resultant DVD, however, works perfectly in my DVD player and the recording quality is excellent. So, besides the time it takes to do so, I would have to say that I am satisfied with the results.

For my purposes, the Firefly remote is worthless, so I dumped it. By the way, if you are going to use this unit with anything other than an antenna or basic cable, you will need to buy a separate IR receiver to control your cable or satellite box. To their credit, aside from the IR Receiver, Diamond includes all the cables and accessories you might need. Additionally, I found the Beyond Media software to be of little use, so I dumped that as well – although I can see that others may very well want to use it.

Even though I had these troubles, I think that most people will buy this product for its “typical” use – watching TV and recording shows. So, just to be fair, I set it up on another computer that way. Everything went pretty smoothly in this case and worked well with the exception of the persistent problem with Norton Internet Security warning. Despite the error message, everything appears to work just fine. Since I was connected to DirecTv, without the added expense of the IR Receiver, I could not test any of the recording scheduling features of the product, but I have no doubt they will work well.

In conclusion, I would have to say that the product is pretty good.