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 | Title : ATI Technologies Inc. ATI-TV Wonder NTSC
Author : ATI Technologies
Release Date : 19990915
Binding : Electronics
Regular Price : $79.00
Amazon.com Price : $
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Editorial Reviews :
125-channel TV-tuner upgrade for your PC / Schedule and record programs, with real-time compression / Capture & save programs
Buyer Reviews :
After reading some of the reviews, I bought this card anticipating some difficulty with installation. However, I had no difficulty at all with the installation. The TV functionality worked immediately. My disappointment really began afterward....
Let's start by saying that if you just want to watch TV on your computer, this product works well. It's the other features that bring about the disappointment.
If your experience is like mine, don't plan on doing anything with closed-captioning. The vast majority of the time, the captions are garbled beyond usability. You might as well forget the 'hot word' capability and other features leveraged off closed-captioning, as well.
I also found the video capture disappointing. If you use the proprietary AVI format, you can do simple editing. However, the video quality will be sub-VCR, and the file size large. To add further aggravation, the sync between sound and video is terrible. And finally, the video player crashes when running full screen, and since the format is proprietary, one can only play the resulting video with the ATI player.
Recording in MPEG-1 format is much better. With an adequately powerful computer (this machine is a P-III 667EB), you can produce videos with reasonable file size, with pretty good sync between sound and video, and decent image quality, though still sub-VCR. You can also play these files on any MPEG-1 capable player. However, you will not be able to edit these files. All in all, if you want to make video recordings, you are probably better off with a VCR in front of your TV-Wonder card. In general, I would recommend an MPEG-2 solution if you really want to do anything serious with video capture on your computer.
Now for the bad news... This solution is predominately software based. Real-time applications such as those provided with this product are always prone to difficulties in the Windows 9x environment. With the software for this product, I have experienced numerous 'blue screen of death' crashes, and crashes to re-boot (one second your computer is running, the next second it is rebooting of its own accord). I have had more crashes in the course of a couple of days with this software, than I have experienced in the last several years of my computer experience for all my other applications combined. Admittedly, I'm running this software on an extremely loaded 'family' machine. But then again, what use is software that can't play well with others?
To provide further annoyance, there are numerous non-crash bugs. For instance, in the video editor, if you change the counter to display time instead of frames, the frame step feature no longer works correctly. This makes editing tough! Also, I'm suspicious that this software package damaged my DirectX installation. I am suddenly experiencing collateral problems with games, etc. since the install. I dread fixing this problem. A re-install of DirectX already failed to make any improvement, though the diagnostic tool still dutifully tells me that the installation is broken...here we go!
In summary, I'll put things in perspective. The performance of the raw TV functionality is very good with this product. Everything else marginally works. With care most crashes can be avoided, and the basic functionality of the digital VCR can be useful with subdued expectations. A hardware-based MPEG-2 solution (available from Pinnacle and others) will provide far superior results. But, we're talking at least ... vs. ... for the TV-Wonder. Given the price and the TV functionality, I give the TV-wonder a two star rating.
(by An electronics fan)
Features/Technical Specs :
* Intelligent 125-channel TV tuner
* Enables video wallpaper
* Schedules TV viewing
* Captures still and motion video
* PCI-bus TV tuner
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