Nice for the price as long as you are a "do-it-yourself" type.
Written: Jan 09 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: good quality picture (windowed), simple to use, affordable
Cons: poor full screen quality, ATI slow to release updates, diagonal lines?!!!
The Bottom Line: A great buy for the money! Some computer know-how required to install the drivers and software. Has a diagonal line bug, but there is an easy "work around" to it.
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| robhound's Full Review: ATI TV Wonder |
Recently I hit on the idea of adding a TV tuner/capture card to my PC with the goal of creating Video-CD (VCD and SCVD) disks to view on my family room DVD player. There are a number of TV programs that I enjoy watching and keep tapes of. So, I thought, "why not capture them, edit out commercials, and burn to video-CDs?" Hence, my mission began.
Before you read on, I will first state that I have only gotten as far as adding the TV tuner card and capturing video to my hard disk. (The entire "burn to video CD process" is rather high on the learning curve, and I do not want to detract from the purpose of this review.
I looked at the various ATI, Hauppauge and Pinnacle cards on the market and settled on the ATI TV-Wonder. Because I already had a decent 2D/3D graphics card that I was very happy with, I immediately limited my choices to TV tuner/capture cards. After trolling around the net and looking at the different products, I decided that the ATI TV-Wonder offered the best value for the money. The perceptual quality of the TV "on screen" was as good as what is available from Hauppage and Pinnacle at a considerably lower price. Also, the TV-Wonder offers most of the features of the Hauppauge Personal DVR (digital video recorder), but ATI does not oversell their card on these features. (One this last point I give ATI some credit because they do not peddle their cards as the be-all-and-end-all of PC TV Tuners.)
Physically installing and hooking up the card was entirely painless, the software and drivers, where another matter entirely.
I found an updated version of the software and driver bundle on the ATI web site (version 7.1) and downloaded it prior to starting the installation. The installer utility, however, is nothing more than a glorified unzipping tool. When I ran the setup program that I downloaded it created two folders on my C: drive... one with the driver installations and another with the program installations! It also presented me with a "warning" readme file about installing the drivers before the software. You have to be careful at this point because your C: drive will now have several folders all containing "setup.exe" programs. Read and follow the instructions TO THE LETTER and you will be okay. If not, you have to pull the works and start over. The instructions are not overly user friendly, so read and follow them carefully.
I intentionally decided to install the drivers and software first, so that when I physically plugged in the card, Windows XP would autodetect everything (which it did).
Fortunately, as I mentioned, physically installing the card and hooking it up was a breeze. The card fit into an open PCI slot in my PC. I connected the included RCA mini-stereo jack from the "line out" of the ATI TV-Wonder to the "line in" on my sound card. Last, I used a two-way cable splitter where the cable runs into my cablemodem. Don't listen to the cable company folks! I have had no problem or quality deterioration since I did this... and I already have the cable on a four-way split where it comes into my house.
So how does it work? In a nutshell, GREAT... with a few qualifying statements to follow). In windowed mode at 352 x 240, or smaller, the images are sharp and clear with only a modest amount of color shifting. The software settings for the card do allow you to adjust a la the standard TV type of adjustments: contrast, brightness, color, picture, etc. So the color shifting is easily overcome. In fact, most folks may not even notice it. I, on the other hand, did because of my work in color printing and video.
When you size the window to 640 x 480 or larger (including full screen), the image suffers. From what I know, this is unavoidable for a conventional analog tuner because your typical television image is a lower resolution, interlaced image. When you try to display this type of image on a high resolution computer monitor you see all of the "evils" that are not perceptible on a standard television screen. Unless you go for a high-end Hauppauge HDTV tuner card (and have a corresponding HDTV input to the card), you probably won't find any better... especially not at an $80.00 price point.
My ONLY gripe at this point is with a bug with the combination of Windows XP and the ATI TV-Wonder drivers/software. Sometimes when switching to and from record/capture mode, the on-screen image goes out-of-synch and shows up as a diagonally scrambled image (reminiscent of horizontal and vertical hold on older TV's turned way out of whack). The image is easily restored by changing ANY of the display settings that force your video card to "refresh" the screen. I found that flicking the bit depth to, then from 16 or 32 bit, does the trick just fine. Also, even if the "visible" TV channel appears with the diagonal scramble, it still records okay. The signal is getting into the PC okay. The scrambling happens between the video card, TV-tuner card and system software. (One other note: forcing a video card refresh is NOT THE SAME as refreshing your desktop. If you right click and select "refresh", this only tells windows to "redraw" your desktop and images.)
If you can live with the minor inconvenience of "flicking" your video settings to straighten out the image from time to time, this card is a great buy at $80.00. And, like I mentioned, keep in mind that computer monitors are MUCH HIGHER resolution and quality than conventional television picture tubes. For that reason, viewing TV on your PC at larger dimensions will not give you DVD/Digital quality television.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 80.00
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Epinions.com ID:
robhound
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Member: Rob Emenecker
Location: Baltimore, MD, USA
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
All around computer geek... overclocking, power user, case modifications, audio, graphics, video, web, etc.
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