Pinnacle ShowCenter 200 > Reviews > Showcenter wireless

Author's product rating:   

Sound Level	Good
Instructions	Quite Helpful / Understandable
Value for Money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Linking computer to tv and all in 1 music and video
Disadvantages:	Setup

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Start over again, hopefully this review will be better for you and more information. I have the pinnacle showcenter 200 which cost £175, and for what it can do is worth it. There are two parts to the showcenter, you have the silver box and remote. There are no buttons on the silver box which will connect to you tv or hifi simply connect using a scart lead or Composite and Y/C (S-Video) outputs. There are optical or phono connections for audio if you wanted to connet to your hifi. The other part of the package is the software which will be loaded on your pc, This will search for all compatiable media types and tag them so you can select to play them on your tv usng the showcenter box.

Supported media Types
The software that comes with this automatcally seaches your hard drive for all compatiable media types. It then tags them and catalogs them by genre, artist, video, music and many more options. Some of the supported media types are ,

- MP3, WMA - audio types
- JPG, PNG, GIF - image types
- MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX AVI and XviD AVI - Video types

Tv interface
When you want to watch your media on your tv you power up the showcenter and you will be represented with a html style menu where you can select images, movies and music and if you cataloged them on your pc you can then select the genre and other options you want to play. While playing meda off the showcenter the pc and still be used for other tasks though high end plays may not play smoothly, it is fine for browsing the internet and other small tasks.

USB at front
There is a USB port at the front of the showcenter where you can directly connect you digitial camera and flick through your images on your tv.

Summary
This is a good bit of kit if you have alot of media on your pc that you regulary want to watch on tv but can as you distant between the 2. This is quite complicatied to setup as you need to know ip settings to link it to your pc. Overall i haven't used it that much but is hand if you download alot of mp3 you can just listen to them on your hifi using the showcenter