Pinnacle's ShowCenter 200 seems to offer all the right ingredients for getting content from your PC to your HDTV. With both wired and wireless connectivity, support for Windows Media Video (including the high-def stuff), several digital audio formats, and even Internet radio, it sounds like the perfect match for a modern home entertainment system. Unfortunately, it's not. Software glitches, slow Wi-Fi response times, and a balky remote control make it a less-than-scintillating experience.

The ShowCenter is a compact silver box with an abundance of output connectors, including component video. You can send both 720p and 1080i signals for connecting to high-definition TVs. This means that menus and photos are scaled up to HD—a nice glossy feature, but there's more: The system also supports video clips created using Microsoft's WMV-HD format.

But the software department is where the ShowCenter falls short. First, you need to install Pinnacle's software as well as Microsoft's Windows Media Connect. Strange, since Windows Media Connect alone should let the ShowCenter access content on your hard drive. Also, you must "import" your content into ShowCenter's database, which is built with Microsoft's SQL Server—great for transaction databases but balky and slow when serving up digital media. We installed the software on both a 3.4-GHz Pentium 4 and a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4800. On the Pentium 4 system, the database would occasionally become corrupted, with no way of recovering short of a full reinstall.

Though the unit offers Wi-Fi connectivity in the form of 802.11g, using it was frustrating. Connections were frequently dropped, and sometimes the ShowCenter would refuse to connect. Note that if we used wired Ethernet, connectivity was no problem. And the wireless signal in our test environment was generally quite strong. The ShowCenter's documentation suggests that keeping the wireless router set to lower channel numbers would be more effective, but ours is set to 6, so that wasn't the issue.

The supplied remote control yields very little tactile feedback, which—when coupled with the slow response times—made using the ShowCenter frustrating. You find yourself wondering whether you really did push a button correctly. Occasionally, multiple button pushes would lock the system up.

When the ShowCenter worked, we got terrific image quality. Photos and videos streamed from a PC in a different room looked great scaled up to HDTV resolutions. Even so, some WMV-HD clips played well while others yielded an "unsupported" error message. Audio piped through the ShowCenter's digital audio outputs also sounded fine through our Onkyo A/V receiver.

In the end, however, the Pinnacle ShowCenter 200 proved too frustrating and limiting to use. The software glitches, poor remote control, and lackluster Wi-Fi implementation marred what would otherwise have been a spot-on feature set.