Well, for a hundred bucks, you can satisfy that high-definition craving with the Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick. Plug this nifty little gadget into a USB port on your computer, hook up an antenna or cable feed to the other end and you’re in business — HDTV in a window on your desktop, or full-screen if you prefer. So you’re sitting around, totally bored with the same old PC, bored with word processing, bored with spreadsheets, bored with Web browsing, bored with music, bored with news, bored with grainy YouTube videos.

The software bundle includes a digital video recorder so you can record your favorite shows while you’re not there. There’s even a tiny remote control so you can watch without getting out of your chair. Then you realize it’s Sunday night, and it strikes you: What you really want to do is watch “Desperate Housewives.” On your computer. In HD.

First things first: there’s only so much TV you can expect from a $100 PC gadget. The Pro Stick generally delivers what it promises, but there’s no way a picture processed through software by a PC and displayed on a monitor that’s not optimized for television is going to look as good as it would on a stand-alone HDTV set, or on even a monitor driven by an internal PC tuner. The Pro Stick also has an intriguing feature whose existence I was only vaguely aware of before this. It’s a circuit called a QAM tuner, which brings in unscrambled digital broadcasts — including some in high-definition, directly from a cable company feed without a cable box, high-def or otherwise. QAM is also built into most new digital sets.

You won’t get your cable company’s whole digital menu, most of which is scrambled unless you rent a digital box. But you’ll generally see the same digital channels you’d pick up with an antenna, without the vagaries of digital reception over-the-air. You may even pick up some video-on-demand channels if someone in your neighborhood is watching them.

Still, the quality was fine for casual, close-up viewing — better than analog TV tuner cards I’ve tried in the past. For that reason, the Pro Stick is a cheap and efficient way to turn a student’s laptop into a dorm room entertainment center. Assuming you’re OK with a student who watches “Desperate Housewives” instead of studying. The Pro Stick is a black box about the size of your thumb, and about twice the volume of a flash memory drive. It can plug directly into a USB 2.0 port, but a short, bundled extension cable gives it more flexibility.

To process HDTV, you’ll need reasonably up-to-date hardware. The minimum requirement is a Pentium 4 processor running at 2.8 GHz or better, a gigabyte of memory, Windows XP or Vista, and at least 20 gigabytes of free hard drive space if you want to record programs.
The other end of the tuner sports a standard coaxial connector for an antenna or cable feed. Rounding out the package are the small remote control, a monopole antenna for direct, over-the-air tuning, audiovisual cables to pull an analog signal directly from a set-top cable box, and two software CDs.

I had TVCenter scan for both analog and digital channels, as well as FM radio stations and Internet radio sites. The TV center displayed a crisp, clear picture on a 17-inch Dell LCD monitor, particularly with digital channels. Setup was easy. I installed Pinnacle’s TVCenter Pro software, connected the tuner to the antenna and started the program. TVCenter displays the picture in a resizable window, changes channels and serves as a front end to the program guide and DVR.

Bottom line: It may not replace a dedicated DVR, but Pinnacle’s HDTV Pro Stick turns your PC into a TV set and pulls in every analog and digital channel that’s available and unscrambled, whether you’re using an antenna or cable feed. It’s relatively cheap, and you can use it on more than one PC.

E-mail Himowitz at mike.himowitz@baltsun.com

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