Muchos bang for your buck
Written: Feb 13 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Beautiful picture, low system requirements, clean capturing, inexpensive, and versatile
Cons: finicky installation, not enough documentation, and saves to proprietary format
The Bottom Line: If you like it, buy it. It can do all it says it does, and some it can't. Look around at pricewatch.com for the best price.
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| dj245's Full Review: ATI TV Wonder |
I paid $44 for the Tv-wonder VE (value edition). Installation was simple, but there were things I had to figure out, like that I had to disable Norton Antivirus for the software to install, and what "composite video" really is. But I figured it out.
Basically this is a great card for capturing real-time video from DVD, Cable, antenna, video game, or a sattelite dish. HOWEVER capturing from VHS is really terrible quality. (bad signal processing from within the VCR).
Another minor problem is that you can't use virtualdub or another program to capture video. You MUST use ATI's software. That means that you're limited to 1 2GB file at a time. This can hold anywhere from 1 minute to 166 minutes of video. You can get 44 minutes of clean 360x240 video with ATI's realtime compressor, even on a pentium 166. This is bad because if you copy a DVD (for archival purposes only) you have to make 2 or 3 files to get it all, and you can't join them later without disrupting the audio stream. note: this compression is with ATI's 1.0 compressor, if you have MMX you can get better compression with the same results.
JPG screen capture is pretty much WYSIWYG, you can doctor it up later if you want.
another great thing is the low system requirements. They are vvvveeeeeeerrrrry low. My pentium166 with 32mb of ram (2mb video ram) runs it fine with no problems. I think all you need is a pentium and windows95. Tons of hard drive space couldn't hurt either. Neither could a CD-r drive, but that's another review.
Anyway, i'm VERY happy with mine, and i'm sure I got my money's worth, and a lot more.
bought it at www.pc-beyond.com
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 44
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Epinions.com ID:
dj245
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Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 1 member
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