One of the biggest disappointments faced by many new owners of handheld video devices is that you can’t easily transfer your favorite DVDs to them for on-the-go enjoyment. If you’ve already
bought every season of Lost on DVD, why should you have to fork over two bucks an episode at the iTunes store just so you can watch it on your iPod instead of your TV? Enter the Pinnacle Video Transfer, a $130 gadget designed to address this very problem. The little black box plugs into a video source on one end, into a media player (or hard drive) on the other, and transfers any analog video signal with no computer required. You can transfer old home movies from VHS, save DVDs in iPod-friendly format, or — hard as it is to believe, I know people do this — record yourself playing your favorite video game so you can replay all the shoot-’em-up action for friends. All by pressing a single button when the program you want starts playing on your TV. As with many gadgets, this one may play better with PCs: My iPod is formatted to communicate with my Mac, and as a result I couldn’t record anything to it, even after following Pinnacle’s support instructions and reformatting the iPod’s hard drive (and losing tons of data as a result). The company says few users have this problem, but it has released a $100 device aimed solely at Mac users — the main difference being that the latter needs to be hooked up to your computer while you do transfers.




















