Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
With Pinnacle ShowCenter, it's easy to enjoy all the movies, photos and music stored on your PC right on your TV or home stereo system. Connect ShowCenter to a PC via the built-in Ethernet connector or a wireless card inserted in the available PCI slot and you're ready to go. Because ShowCenter makes any video, audio or image file stored on any networked PC available on any brand of TV or home stereo system, ShowCenter is 100% hassle-free. Moreover, the friendly set-up assistant and incredibly intuitive PC and set-top box software make selecting, organizing and enjoying multimedia content 100% complexity-free. |
Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 a decent product for a great price, Aug 24, 2023
does what it claims: facilitates streaming of almost any media type / format from your PC to your TV. the items gets less than 5 stars because the software on the unit, and the PC is a little unpolished.
the PC software primarily organizes the media files that can be accessed from the unit. while it's a little convuluted, in the simplest form it boils down to specifying the folders you want to be accessible from the unit. oddly, upon installation, the PC software made every single media file on my hard drive available, including icons, and things in my browser cache. i went back later and removed everything in the database (which took a long time), and then named specific folders to make available.
i picked up this item for $79 after rebate. if you look around, you can't beat this. there are other products near this price but they only stream music and pitures, not video. also, amazingly, this unit comes with a wireless G PC card, to allow the unit to communicate w/ your PC wirelessly (this is not required, as it also has a standard ethernet port).
note that this item is being discontinued, in favor of the showcenter 200. the primary difference is that the 200 has HDTV outputs. this model supports DVD (720x480, interlaced) resolution ... unless you have a HDTV, and have HDTV video media (1080i) on your PC, there is not a lot of benefit to getting the 200 model. the 200 model also has a USB port to access media on a USB storage device (MP3 player, digital camera, digital camcorder, etc), and supports higher resolution picture formats. it also costs over twice as much.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
 I love this media player, Mar 15, 2023
I got my Showcenter a month ago. We play a lot of our videos on it which we previously would have had to view on our PC.
Our Showcenter is directly connected to our AP via an ethernet cable. The Showcenter server software runs on Windows and is quite good. It plays almost all of our videos, music and pictures. It isn't quite easy to put together playlists but otherwise the display is quite easy to use and flashy.
I don't actually use the Windows software, preferring to keep all my files on a Linux server instead. There are three open source alternatives to the commercial software: Oxylbox, Open Showcenter and SwissCenter. Open Showcenter is my fav just because it is easier to configure. The other two have extra features so you can automatically get the weather, etc.
All in all I recommend this, but if you aren't very computer literate you may have difficulties configuring it.
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Based on 2 reviews.