ATI TV Wonder PRO----an ode to the return line

mustang_steve

mustang_steve

c[H]ewbacca
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Jul 28, 2003
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Well yesterday I finally got cable, and re-discovered how bad the audio was on my Pinnacle PC-TV pro....so off to the store to buy a new tuner card. It had to be PCI and preferable not use a cable for sound.

-----Note, if you are an ATI !!!!!!, and cannot handle criticism and outright flamebait...please stop reading...this product deserves far worse than any bad words I can eek out-----

Well I saw an ATI at teh store, the TV Wonder Pro. It seemed to have some nice features and such, and the requirement of a video card seems like it would not need that silly cable and inastead use the bus and directsound to do it's job. I wish that was true.

Upon opening the card, it turned out to just be another variant of the Phillips tuner you can get in the PC-TVpro (which is now a $20 card, the ATI was $100). It also had a audio patch cable, something not mentioned on the outside of the box. Oh well I thought...ATI at least knows their stuff.

Or so I thought again...poor naieve me. I set it up, and well...video quality is terrible unless i turn HQ video on..but then the sound is so heavily compressed its unbearable....when the HQ video is off the sound is always too quiet and too loud at once...I have no idea how, but it is.

So I went to get updated drivers...guess what, now the sound is crappy under all conditions. The vido quality is improved though...but that doesnt matter since the sound is so staticky and clipping so much that its impossible to listen to.

Also note their lack of 24 hours support, and the fact this card isnt even on their support site for contacting support. I also am not willing to even RMA this card for a new one since I am reasonably sure now this is a driver issue and not a hardware issue since the driver update made the sound that much worse.

My end of it is ATI screwed up a product even worse than it was when it came out...The sound does ruin the product to the point it's not worth buying. If I was ATI, I would fire the staff behind this product for being too deaf and too blind to even be working on this product. Video quality thats no better than a 4 year old card, and sound that's far, far worse....for five times as much. This card won't even gat a rating...to take that kind of time is only for card that at least function right..

Basically, don't buy this card...its sucks in ways words cannot describe...and even at $20 is a complete waste of money. Get any other card in ti's price range or lower and you will most likely have a better card.
 
Note....I just went to using the aux connector while still keeping the software on "line-in" and no more static...but once i set the software to aux, static....it IS the software. Of course the software is what makes this card...so these guys get all my rage for not noticing this. Testing is not a "lets get it done quick we want to ship by X" thing...sometimes you go to fight back and say look it's not ready.

And a note to the "You wouldnt know the kind of testing X does" pack....of course I don't know, but I do know one thing...the product does not work when used EXACTLY as intended, therefore it is safe to say testing was either not dome properly, or was rushed through testing as fast as possible. Ther are only so many ways to use a volume control

/sigh

I hope upon them the pains of a thousand screaming IBM deathstars.
 
I'll agree that ATI screwed the pooch on all of their PCI TV-tuner cards, at least the drivers.

Try using DScaler and see if that improves things for you.
 
I thought the TV Wonder Pro had a hardware MPEG-2 compression chip on it. :confused:

Anyways, the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 is a great card. I've had both versions and both are great (first version had a horrible remote, but that's another story). Those go for $90-$100 after rebate on sale.
 
I still wonder why this was moved to video cards....makes no sense....it has something to do with video, but it cant display video on it's own....oh well.

yeah, dscaler doesnt seem to want to play nice with this card...all i get is are the ble scrrens you get when your getting too much static.

I did some more mudging around and found out the internal audio connector is also a bit better than the external. Still makes me mad that they don't jsut use directx for audio transfer.
 
i know a little of your plight and can share some exp over the years.

original tv wonder 100$ res 720x240 (yea it looked stupid but 240 was as high as it would go) driver install was a nightmare for 4 years until 6 months ago they released drivers for that work nicely.

msi tv@anywhere 50$ better picture much easier drivers. but again stupid external sound cable and dubbing would often go off and i could never listen to anything while recording. oh yes and if any volume control anywhere was set above 30% major distortion.

hdtv wonder 200$ a much better package picture quality is better then the other 2. there is no external sound connector even if you wanted too.i havent been able to test hdtv yet but. the sound records in stereo and in mpeg2 720x576 and it must use some comb filters all though i didnt see them mentioned. i do wish it had hdtv input for game consoles and such
 
joobjoob said:
i know a little of your plight and can share some exp over the years.

original tv wonder 100$ res 720x240 (yea it looked stupid but 240 was as high as it would go) driver install was a nightmare for 4 years until 6 months ago they released drivers for that work nicely.

msi tv@anywhere 50$ better picture much easier drivers. but again stupid external sound cable and dubbing would often go off and i could never listen to anything while recording. oh yes and if any volume control anywhere was set above 30% major distortion.

hdtv wonder 200$ a much better package picture quality is better then the other 2. there is no external sound connector even if you wanted too.i havent been able to test hdtv yet but. the sound records in stereo and in mpeg2 720x576 and it must use some comb filters all though i didnt see them mentioned. i do wish it had hdtv input for game consoles and such
Click to expand...

I agree. I went through two TV Wonders, 2 years ago. Both failed, and I had to settle for my circa 1998 Hauppage card which still performs flaswlessly. Eventually got the HDTV Wonder and all is well so far. No driver installation issues. The software itself needs a little work since some of the analog cable channels come in without color, unless you do a rapid shift up and down. HDTV is great though.
 
the thing i love about pctv, is that like my cable box changes channels real slow like maybe 3-5 secs to load each channel. thats as bad as sattelite

i like 1 second per channel which i can do on the crisp fast pctv tuners.
 
joobjoob said:
did you have to upgrade the antenna?
Click to expand...

No upgrades here. Using default Ati antenna coupled with another indoor antenna (using splitters) to add signal strength.
 
My ATI TV Wonder Pro works fine, when SP2 was released and was patched on my computer as it fixed the freezeing/hanging with any of the 2.4/2.6/2.8C Intel P4 CPUs with HT enabled.

Quality and Sound is pretty good, well I spent $100 CAD on mine but it came with the remote so I can watch at my bed. My only problem with this TV tuner is that it doesn't decode inreal time or something. Cause I have a TV outside my room and when I have it on in my room with my speakers turned up, there's like a 1 second delay. When I hook up my Dreamcast to the thing, I get the same thing. I can't play any of my games cause of this bullshit 1 second delay time for decoding.
 
I thought mine wasnt doing realtime as well, but had nothing to compare it to. I always thought the mouths didnt match the speech, but I havent had over jack crap for sleep over the past 3 months so I thought it might have been the lack of sleep making me not think stright or something.
 
Well watching TV on my computer the speech and the mouth motion match, it's just when I'm between my room and outside and if I have both my outside TV and my TV tuner on at the sametime on the same channel, there's a 1 second delay between the one outside to my TV tuner which is funny cause the wall outlet comes from my room which is hooked up to my computer and the outside TV is hooked up through a splitter from my room.

As for the Dreamcast thing, I'll have it plugged in and when I play say Street Fighter, and when I say press a punch button, it won't do it til like 1/2 a second or a full 1second later after I have already pressed the button which ruins the entire game play.

Kinda disappointed by not really. The whole reason for me buying it was watching TV on computer and the remote for watching from my bed which is the opposite corner from my computer in my room which is wicked.

So I can't really complain a whole lot as it serves that purpose well, I would just like it to decode in realtime for my Dreamcast so I can play Third Strike :(
 
i tried playing ps2 on hdtv wonder with inputs. and i get the same heavy delay.

but on my main rig i have msi tv@anywhere and i can play ps2 through svideo and i get no noticeable delay.

however i did notice that the picture was much better going through the ati tv wonder then through the msi. so obviously they are doing some sorta hardware picture cleanup which is casuing hte delay.
 
mustang_steve said:
I thought mine wasnt doing realtime as well, but had nothing to compare it to. I always thought the mouths didnt match the speech, but I havent had over jack crap for sleep over the past 3 months so I thought it might have been the lack of sleep making me not think stright or something.
Click to expand...

on ati card ive found if i have timeshifting enabled that i get the mouth/audio delay.
 
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