Video-Cable Reviews

I bought this at target to use for my big screen and Directv satellite connection, I was better off using the crappy cables that come from the manufacture...

This cable provies the best and clearest possible connections with your equipment.

Don't expect your dvds to come out to "like new" condition. You can only get "like new" results from professional type of machines costing at least five hundred dollars.

With that said, it does repair scratched discs so that the movie or the music plays without skipping or freezing anymore. It does leave circular scratch marks, which are made by the buffing pads on the machine. As for the 'cleaning' cycle where you have to use a gritty type of solution, it leaves a hazy film which I think is supposed to be hazy as it forms a protective layer from further scratches.

Use it if you have a bunch of scratched dvds or cds that are skipping and you want them to be playable again. But, don't expect for them to look brand new again.

I love Monster Cables, but these POD design cables are a pain. The angled design of the connectors (see the picture) actually increased the strain between them; that strain makes them difficult to install and tends to cause them to work themselves loose occasionally. The interlocking design of the POD is a good idea for keeping your cabling neat; however, the cable strain makes that feature difficult to use as well. You really have to spend a long time playing with these cables to get them to stay put.

Do yourself a favor by purchasing the regular, straight Monster A/V cables.

I love Monster Cables, but these POD design cables are a pain. The angled design of the connectors (see the picture) actually increased the strain between them; that strain makes them difficult to install and tends cause them to work themselves loose occasionally. The interlocking design of the POD is a good idea for keeping your cabling neat; however, the cable strain makes that feature difficult to use as well. You really have to spend a long time playing with these cables to get them to stay put.

Do yourself a favor by purchasing the regular, straight Monster A/V cables.

The picture for this one is wrong. There are RCA jacks for the left and right audio channels, and an SVideo connector (the round one) for the video, not another RCA jack as pictured here. There probably should be both types.

Since the ordering of the connectors is probably not the same on your equipment as on the POD, and the POD cables are all quite short, the twisting can put some extraction force on the cable ends, which seem like they may come out by themselves in some cases. Didn't have a problem myself though.

Decent quality stuff. Ridiculously expensive like all Monster Cable stuff.

I have been using this powercenter for over a year and it works well. What I like best is that I don't notice any loss of signal quality when using the Coax filter. I have noticed this with other coax filters. The color coded and labelled outlets also are handy when moving/adding equipment. This way you know exactly what you are unplugging. A couple things I didn't like about the powercenter is that it is only rated at 15amps (~1800 watts). So if you have a 20amp circuit for your hometheater you are not able to draw all the power you could. This is probably not a big deal unless you have a lot of equipment and are running it all from the powercenter. Another item to watch for it that the coax input/output connectors have a tendency to loosen up. Then when I move the powercenter my sub woofer thumps loudly. Like it is shorting out internally. This is easy fixed or avoided by tightening the coax fittings. Lastly this unit will not take care of ground loop hums that can occur from improperly grounded cable feeds.

Running these beautiful babies from a sony progressive scan dvd player produced nothing more than the average grade monster cable quality. In defense of Monster, I must say that there are exceptional players out there (as insanely priced as these cables) and this product may be intended for those types of players which can generate a richer image.

The cables themselves are gorgeous.

I own an HP Desktop Pavilion that I bought a year ago. I installed this product with no problems by opening up my PC, inserting the PCI card, connecting the power to the PCI card, booting up my PC, and then installing the appropriate driver. I have the Windows 98 Second Edition operating system on my PC.

Then I hooked up my Sony DCR TRV 33 mini DV camcorder, of course using the firewire interface. The ActionTec PCI card failed to recognize the camera. ... the cable provided with the product was bad. ... I will never purchase another product from ActionTec again.

I bought this product and tried it in a number of different machines--all Win 98 or Win2k. Windows recognized it after some coaxing. But the performance was dreadful in each case--I either got a choppy data stream or none at all. I checked out their website... all in all pretty useless. So I wrote to Actiontec customer service about it and never got a reply. Avoid this company and it's products.

I had no problem installing the card (I guess I'm one of the lucky ones). It works, but the video editing software that comes with it is useless. I'm not a pro, but it took me forever to figure out how to input the video, and now I can't figure out how to edit it (it did not come with instructions). I'm going to buy some other software. There were no bad reviews before I bought this product, but after reading the others, I'm glad it worked for me. However, I would be cautious about buying this product due to other's experiences. Good luck.

I recently bought the Adaptec videoh media center and right from the start I had problems. When trying to install the drivers I would get an error saying that this hard-ware cannot be installed. I called the tech support. They sent me an email on how to install the drivers which didn't work, so I called tech support again. They had never heard of this problem, but told me that the problem was with my computer. So I reformatted my hard-drive. When I tried installed the drivers the computer would freeze up and my mouse would not work. I called tech support one last time. Their response was something is wrong with my computer and they could not help me. I tried this on another pc and I ran into the same problems. I sent this back to Amazon with a note explaining all the problems I was having asking for a full refund.
Don't buy this product! I am a computer tech at a university and this was the first time I had any problems like this or ever heard someone say sorry we can't help you.
If I could I would give this product no stars, but I can't

I recently bought the Adaptec videoh media center and right from the start I had problems. When trying to install the drivers I would get an error saying that this hard-ware cannot be installed. I called the tech support. They sent me an email on how to install the drivers which didn't work, so I called tech support again. They had never heard of this problem, but told me that the problem was with my computer. So I reformatted my hard-drive. When I tried installed the drivers the computer would freeze up and my mouse would not work. I called tech support one last time. Their response was something is wrong with my computer and they could not help me. I tried this on another pc and I ran into the same problems. I sent this back to Amazon with a note explaining all the problems I was having asking for a full refund.
Don't buy this product! I am a computer tech at a university and this was the first time I had any problems like this or ever heard someone say sorry we can't help you.
If I could I would give this product no stars, but I can't

I've had this product for about 2 months now. I use it solely for watching television on my laptop, so I haven't explored the bundled video-editing software, and can't comment on that.

My impression is similar to that described in some of the other reviews on Amazon, but I can sum it up by saying that the device itself is functional and works as I expected. It's the bundled software that stinks, and it's just as bad as one of the other reviewers suggested. Intervideo WINDVR 3.0 comes with the Adaptec Videoh, and it's what you use for viewing, and recording, live television. It often has a tendency to hang for no apparent reason, and then when you try to use the "Windows Task Manager" to shut it down, it doesn't work.. 5 minutes later, the computer goes to the dreaded blue screen, completely out of the blue (so to speak). And I'm running this on a new laptop (1300 Ghz Centrino, 256, 80 gig, etc.). The Windvr software crashes the whole system almost on a daily basis.

You can't trust the scheduling software, and one of the most serious design defects I've encountered is the fact that Windvr will stop recording when it reaches the 4 gigabytes limit for the individual file it's recording - in other words, slightly more than an hour's worth of recorded material. Imagine that you've paused a live broadcast of a movie you've been wanting to see.. after about half-an-hour of recording, you come back to press play. Everything is fine for another half-hour, when you notice that Windvr is no longer recording the live feed.. the "delay time" (indicating how much recorded material you have left to watch) keeps getting smaller, when it should remain the same. You reach the end of the recorded portion of the movie and the screen pauses.. you have to hit "stop" - so that you're now viewing the live feed - and by now the movie has gone off the air and they're broadcasting something else.
I've missed more movie endings, and more exciting finishes to sports events in this way, you'd think they would have released an update for this obvious flaw.

Think again. A quick survey of the Intervideo website reveals that they have *never* issued any sort of update to this software, and evidently don't intend to - there is truly no support. Why Adaptec chose this particular software to bundle with their product, I'll never know.

I am told that other software is compatible with the Adaptec Videoh, including the "Personal Video Station" software (which for some reason wouldn't install on my machine). At any rate, the added software will probably set you back an additional $100 or so - but it sounds like it does have the advantage of being more functional, at least.