Update: May 12, 2003
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With the release of their new MMC 7.9 in April 2003, ATI has taken significant steps towards improving their software. I've bumped the rating from 2 to 4 stars for this reason.

Using this latest revision with Windows XP professional:

- the sound issues have been fixed

- the channel changing is faster

- the digital VCR now includes Windows Media Encoder compression formats (still no divx though!) so you can record programs without insane file sizes.

- the TV program now starts properly without requiring a screen refresh every time.

- The installation package is still overcomplicated. Now they want you to install the latest MDAC package (Microsoft Data Access Components) along with the drivers and console. Why do I need 18 megabytes of COM data access components to watch TV?! Now that's cruft. DirectX 9.0 is also required and Windows Media Encoder 9.0 is optional if you want to record in WMF (recommended.)

With these fixes this card has become far more useful and usable - finally the solution i was looking for for my no-TV apartment. This weekend i set it up to record two episodes of the Simpsons that I would miss while doing other things; I came home and there they were, encoded in Windows Media format (about 250 MB each) and ready to go (skipping the commercials rules!)

Note that the updated software is not included in most retail boxes (though it probably will be in the future.) To download it you need to go to http://www.atitech.com and click on "find a driver."

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Original Review (2 stars):
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I couldn't believe the low quality of the software that came with this card. Its features are nice - an online programming guide, you can flag shows for recording, etc etc. But there are some serious problems that ATI has yet to fix:

- the installation program is so bad it's laughable. They require you to register a list of drivers by yourself, execute multiple programs in the correct order... I'm a computer programmer, and i know bad software when i see it. This is it.

- every time i start the software, the TV screen is a jumbled mess (as if you twisted the "v.hold" knob on an old TV.) I have to refresh the display every time i start the program to make it work. And sometimes that doesn't work either, and i have to refresh it 5 or 10 times before I get a picture. I suspect many users wouldn't even know how to do this.

- my sound only picks up about 50% of the time when I change channels, so I have to flip back and forth anywhere from 2 to 20 times before I get sound.

- the recording doesn't offer any flexibility in terms of codecs. MPEG-2 encoded files are way too big for everyday use. Why not let me use DivX?

- the recording does not work very often for me because, as previously stated, the sound doesn't often pick up. so the program changes to channel 5 and starts to record, but the sound didn't kick in, so i get a 1.5 gigabyte MPEG-2 file for a 60 minute show, and there's no sound.

- changing channels takes a good 1/2 to 2 seconds. Very annoying when you want to flip.

I thought there was something terribly wrong with my hardware at first. I went through some help with ATI tech support, but they were no help at all. I have a really high quality sound card and the tech i talked to said i should replace it with a soundblaster. And so on.

THEN i ran it under Linux (mandrake 9.1) and HALLELUJAH! All my problems went away. The card is VideoForLinux (V4L) compatible and using XawTV, which is included with Mandrake, i couldn't believe how well it worked. Channel flipping is instantaneous, the sound works perfectly. So despite the insistence of ATI's tech support, there is nothing wrong with my bloody sound card. It's their crappy software. For frustrated users, i would suggest:

1)install a linux partition on your hard drive. Pretty major step just to make a TV card work. But hey, you gotta start breaking those shackles to microsoft sometime. The added bonus here is that you can install MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org) or Freevo (http://freevo.sourceforge.net) and basically have the same functionality as a TiVo - scheduled recordings, remote control, program listings, pause live TV, etc etc.

2) try out some different software than the stuff ATI includes. There have got to be better windows drivers and software out there. If you find some please let me know.

Bottom line: if you're a novice user this thing is not going to work well out of the box for you. You're going to have to do some work on your own and if you don't know what you're doing i suspect it will be very frustrating.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 80