Would be great, if it worked
Written: Mar 24 '01 (Updated Mar 25 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Inexpensive, nice smooth TV/Cable viewing on your PC
Cons: Extremely tricky setup, I never got more than simple TV viewing to work
The Bottom Line: This would be a great card, if not for the mediocre software and compatibility issues. I'd look into other cards to try and avoid the installation headaches.
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| Guru|DV's Full Review: ATI TV Wonder |
I bought this card to allow me to watch TV on my PC. Let's face it, watching TV on your computer is just neat. Unfortunately, simply watching TV is about as far as I got. Installation of this card turned out to be too much for me, and I'd like to think I'm no slouch at solving tricky technical problems.
The first time I booted after installing the card, Windows 98 recognized that something was there and asked for drivers. I decided to skip installing the drivers just yet so that I could install everything according to the procedure described in the manual. This turned out to be a mistake, as my computer powered itself off as soon as it started playing the Windows startup sound. I restarted and this time installed the drivers by hunting around the installation CD for the appropriate .inf files. This got me past the bootup phase, and I proceeded to start ATI's installer from the CD. The installer crashed the first time, and ran the second time I tried it. This installed the drivers again, as well as ATI's multimedia center software, including video CD, audio CD player, TV tuner and video editor.
Excited, I rebooted and fired up the TV app. The first time it's run, it runs a configuration wizard. On the third screen, it asks you to select your TV connection type (USA Cable, in my case), and push the AutoScan button to search for available channels. To my dismay, pushing AutoScan caused a total lockup of my system. Even the mouse stopped moving. After an hour or so of beating my head on my monitor, I discovered that removing my SoundBlaster PCI128 card would get me past this stage. Of course, then I had no sound. But, I could watch lovely smooth, silent television right on my monitor! I decided to install my old SoundBlaster 16, and after some fiddling was able to get the audio to function by connecting the TV Wonder's audio output to the SB16's CD audio input via an internal connector. If I had desired, an internal connection was also provided on the TV Wonder card for me to input CD audio, in case I didn't have enough audio inputs on my sound card.
(Incidentally, the card came with several audio cables, including two internal audio cables with multiple connectors for compatibility with different sound cards and CD drives, and one external 1/8th inch audio cable. The documentation tells me this cable is for connecting the 1/8" audio out jack on the back of the TV Wonder card to the Line In jack on your sound card. However, when I went to hook this up, I discovered that the TV Wonder card in fact has no 1/8" jacks on it at all.)
Finally, I had working video and audio, showing me the 70 or so channels my cable service provides. The card supports channels up to number 125 or so. I don't receive any scrambled channels, so I didn't experiment with them. Now it was time to try some of the more advanced features, such as closed captioning with Hot-Words (apparently monitors the closed-caption feed for words you specify), channel-surfing (display many channels at once so you can see what's on) and Digitial VCR functions.
I switched on the closed captioning, and nothing happened. No text appeared at all, in either "Display on Screen" or "Display in Window" mode. I thought this might be a problem with my cable service, so I figured I wouldn't worry about it for now.
Then I decided to try the channel-surfing function. When I activated this by pushing the appropriate button, the screen displayed a grid of screens with channel numbers, each of which was supposed to contain a still-shot of a different channel. All of these screens were black. Further, the computer locked up. This time the mouse moved, but nothing else worked. After waiting a few minutes, I killed the TV tuner with CTRL-ALT-DELETE and fired it back up, to find that it would no longer display any video. I had to reboot to recover.
Finally I tried the digital video capture function. This feature caused a similar lockup to the channel-surfing, and again I had to kill the TV app. I spent many hours trying to solve these problems. The ATI tech support site suggested that I look for IRQ conflicts, but I found none. I went as far as to remove all the cards from my system except the TV Wonder and my Banshee video card, to no avail. I fiddled around with my CMOS settings to make sure the BIOS was properly supporting PnP, with no visible effects.
I've read several other reviews praising the TV Wonder, so don't get the impression that everyone has the same unpleasant experience I've had. I suspect that my difficulties had to do with hardware incompatibilities. I certainly noticed some sort of incompatibility with my SB PCI128 card. For your reference, here is my system configuration:
AMD K6-2/333, 128 MB RAM
VIA Chipset MB, running Award BIOS
Diamond Monster Fusion (A 3Dfx Banshee card)
SoundBlaster PCI128
Intel EtherExpress PRO/10+ PnP
Windows 98 SE
After I spent about 8 hours or so trying to get the beast working and reading lots of usenet posts describing similar problems with the TV Wonder and other ATI products, I decided to just return the card. I didn't want TV in here that bad.. For the $79 I paid, I think I might just buy a little TV.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 79
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Epinions.com ID:
Guru|DV
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Member: John Spickes
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 3 members
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