13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
This card would be so cool if not for the poor software
Date of Review: Mar 11, 2002
The Bottom Line: If you're easily angered by setup programs that don't work as expected, features that don't work as promised, or if you're a Windows newbie, avoid this beleaguered card.
The TV Wonder VE
Want to watch Buffy while surfing? Thinking of editing video for fun and profit? This card may be a cost-effective high-quality method of doing so. It lacks software you?d want for extensive editing, but you can easily record, edit and save AVI files. It is NOT a stereo tuner. If that?s important to you, move on! As you change channels, it tells you that channels are ?mono? as if that will ever change. You can however dub stereo tapes and DVDs if you connect your VCR?s audio out to the computer and tell the recording software to record from line-in.
I purchased this card from Best Buy for $49 with a $20 rebate, and after a quirky installation, was amazed and pleased at its performance. It doesn?t make your computer into a Patched TV-watching tool. It is a tuner all on its own, freeing up your computer to work normally. It?s a lot less taxing to watch TV than to play any AVI or MPEG file because the card offers some hardware processing. The card frankly works well on my 1GHz Dell Dimension 4100 computer system. I was running Windows ME when I first purchased it and I was astounded at how easily it displayed videos with seemingly no tax on my system. I?ll explain my XP nightmare later.
The tuner finds your active channels for you and even allows V-chip-like password protection for certain channels. It won?t do digital cable or payperview for you naturally. If you want that, you?ll need your cable box and you will have to tune your card to whatever channel your box broadcasts on. It will do 125 channels though. Too bad Time Warner only broadcasts 64 channels plus three high-numbered strays on analog here.
The image quality is good. I mean it?s TV, like you always remembered it, except you?re sitting at your desk, way too close and seeing all the flaws in your monitor, which is much higher resolution than your normal TV. Still, this video is not for the videophile though it does allow composite and S-video input.
Sometimes I wonder why, if channels 44 and 46 look great, does 45 look so much worse than its neighbors? CSPAN, on channel 53 absolutely sucks always, but CSPAN2 on 54 is as sharp as a tack. I wish I had more control over the fine-tuning because it can clearly be off in places. I guess I?m giving away my age by even using the words ?fine tune.? Remember the outer ring on your channel dial? None of my VCRs or TVs have fine tuning available, but they do a better job of locking onto the center frequency. It?s cable. If one channel is okay, so should all of them be.
The ATI TV card handles the audio, but if you want to hear it or record it through your computer, you?ll have to physically feed the sound from the ATI card to your regular sound card?s line in. ATI supplies a mini-to-mini cable as well as a mini-to-two-RCA Y adapter. I use my line in for music production so I use a homemade internal cable that connects to the auxiliary pins (similar to the CD audio cable connecting your CD ROM to your soundcard). The new v7.1 software is much better about remembering to look at AUX for my TV sound when viewing and recording. Since I didn?t use the input they expected, the original software would invariably record no sound unless I reminded it. The original software would also annoy me by muting my Yahoo chat when I muted the TV. It?s been so long that I can?t remember exactly how it annoyed me, but V7.1 integrates nicely soundwise.
There is an annoying click every time you change channels.
The software, like other ATI software I?ve seen, is reminiscent of Windows 3.1. It just doesn?t look like modern Windows software, but it works. I originally installed it so long ago that I can?t remember the ordeal, but I do remember that when I tried to install the newer drivers that I downloaded, it was a huge adventure that I eventually gave up on and I reverted to the software that came with the card. I consider myself an above average user, perhaps a power user. I couldn?t imagine my wife or many of my friends getting the card to work without losing many hours or giving up.
By pressing CTRL-1, CTRL-2, CTRL-3, and CTRL-4, you can quickly switch between small through 640x480 sizes. At smaller than full screen, it looks sharper than normal TV only because computer monitors are hidef (I'm using that term loosely here) compared to regular TVs. At 640x480 you?re looking at all the information in a normal broadcast scrunched into a small hidef window (at least at my resolution of 1024x768). You can also easily drag any edge or corner of the window and resize it to any size in between.
Maximizing takes you to a full-screen TV, which might look quite crappy, but it?s not your ATI card?s fault. You just aren?t used to sitting so close to your television. Most of us sit ten or more feet away from our televisions. If you sit 12 inches from any television, the video detail will be just as distracting. It also has an interesting desktop mode (not supported by all video cards), which makes your wallpaper into a motion picture. The image shows full-screen beneath your desktop icons and taskbar and any windows you open. It looks quite cool, space age even, and will wow your friends if they walk in and see this alien mode, but if you?re going to compute, as I?m doing now as I type, you can?t see all of the image, and you?ll end up reverting to an always-on-top window.
There?s a (handy?) zoom mode that allows you to draw a window over any area of the screen and zoom in there. In zoom mode, dragging anywhere inside the window weightlessly pans around the video.
Clicking on the eye next to the up/down surf buttons takes you to a channel surfing mode that places a menu of thumbnails on the screen for you. To see more than a few channels, you?ll have to go full screen. Clicking on interesting looking thumbnails animates the thumbnail within the menu while it continues to update stills of other channels at about two channels per second. This is quirky. It will only animate the thumbnail for seconds, and it nearly always failed to animate the same thumbnail again if you want to see and hear more without tuning to that channel. Sometimes double-clicking on a thumbnail will take you to that channel, but it?s quirky. I haven?t managed it often.
Captions can show on the screen, in separate windows or be streamed to Html ?TV Magazine? files so that you can generate transcripts complete with stills inline. Well, it?s advertised in the wizard that way. I never got it to work.
My XP Nightmare? Well when I upgraded to Windows XP, the XP drivers update process seemed too iffy. These ATI guys need to develop installers that don?t take so many special instructions and steps outside of the installer. When I did upgrade to the XP drivers, I found a host of new features that I have yet to make work, and new problems. ATI blames the XP driver update. I blame ATI. They should simply write installers that do the whole job.
The TV works fine under XP if you don?t mind an out-of-kilter horizontal hold. ATI?s website said that XP probably incorrectly identified my ATI RAGE video card, but after following their instructions, and I downloaded the 9 meg fix from their troubleshooting center, I found that XP didn?t misidentify my video card. The TV card only worked if I turned on the recorder or if I changed my color display depth while the TV was on.
Speaking of recording, the free 7.1 upgrade adds MPG and Video CD (not to be confused with DVD) recording. The problem is it doesn?t set up your computer to actually view the MPG files, even with its own player. Widows Media Player won?t play them, neither will QuickTime or RealOne Player. Again TERRIBLE abyssmal setup software. These guys should be shot.
Any decent software DVD player will play these files though. Instead of installing my original WinDVD, which came with my computer, I installed PowerDVD, which came with my Hercules sound card of all things. After installing PowerDVD, I was able to view these Mpeg files not only on PowerDVD, but also with ATI's player as well as Windows Media and all my other viewing software. ATI really struck out here with the incomplete setup. Nothing shows it more than this -- or should I say FAILS to show it?
In conclusion, the TV card allows me to work while viewing or listening to television. I have also dubbed video and look forward to trying my hand at doing that more in the future. The setup procedure as well as the installed software is embarrassingly bad. It gets an F. Maybe an I for incomplete. It works, but it?s just not finished. Let?s make this clear: The drivers work great, but the media presentation software is quirky. I wish some company like Real would write their own presentation software for this and other TV cards. ATI?s quality control is sorely lacking in their software department. The card itself has the potential for greatness.
