Phoon

Join Date 10/2001

+382

The EVIL ATI TV Tuner Card...

So, here is my week so far..
For my B-day, I got a TV Tuner card for my PC. A little novelty that I have always wanted to check out.
So, I casually walk in to Best Buy ( I know, mistake #1) and begin looking at the fine ion of TV tuner cards. The plethora of choices was quite astounding. It consisted of a mind shattering 2 models of ATI TV Wonder. Choice A) the Pro model which comes with a remote control, so that you may gaze upon your monitor from across the room.

The ATI TV Wonder VE model. The latter one is supposed to be the same as the Pro version except that there is no remote or S-Video input.
Fast forward....
After spending an obscene amount of time with this POS device, reformatting my HD, installing 2 different OS's I have yet to get it to work with WindowsXP or Win 2000. Upon reading various sources of info about this card, it seems that very few are able to get it to work and have suffered great frustrations with it, and ATI support as well.

The entire point: I lost 3 days worth of entertainment on WC, lost 3 days of work on my newest theme, have lost 3 dozen hairs from my dwindling supply and have blessed my computer with numerous colorful metaphores which made sailors in neighboring countries blush.
As a result, NEVER will I even consider ANYTHING that ATI makes. I base this decision on my own experience with the product and ATI's lack of action to resolve these problems.

Now I feel better. Ahhhh
Back to your regularly scheduled message base now..

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Well, ATI does back up their products with technical support. I should know, I paid over $40 for them to provide me with that technical support so I could get the brand new $200 graphics card I bought from them to work.

I'll use ATI again though... when they deliver it via little devils on ice skates.

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kona0197

Join Date 02/2003

+86

maybe I made a good choice in putting a gforce card in my PC.

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Phoon

Join Date 10/2001

+382

Well, ATI does back up their products with technical support

From what I have read, the support for this device is simply awful.
I'm just going to return it to Best Buy and look for something else.

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If your purpose is to watch TV and PVR stuff use the Hauppagge usb 250 model, it works great.
I also have one of their older WinTV Cards, and it also works flawlessly. ATI capture cards suck. They are proprietary, and do not fumction well, with most capture utilities.
I PVR using the WINTV Card $40, and it works like a champ. But you need some horsepower under the hood, to do it and get smooth results. I use a PIV 2 GHZ and 512 Mb Ram, and a 60Gb HD, the Hauppagge WinTV (pci), Hercules Game Theatre XP Sound, and Hercules Prophet (64Mb) video Card. This allows me to capture 640x480, clear as a bell (picture.) Capturing movies from my sattellite dish, is just as good as ripping (ahemmm Archiving) my DVD's. This also allows me to capture any music I want from the Dish's Music channels.

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oh, yeah and the software I use is Intervideo's WinDVR v3.
The only drawback to that software and the WINTV card is that it is channel specific, like hooking, a VCR to a TV. Channel options are 3 or 4, and I have to make sure the shows I want are ed and active in the channel window.

Hope this is informative.

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WTF I just notice I am listed as Lady CygnusXII, pioop over to edit my preff's and it is checked MALE Gender. WILD!!! guess there is some screws loose at WinCusto.

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kona0197

Join Date 02/2003

+86

No you can change the pre fix in your profile.

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it might just be me but your story lacked some very spacific detail, being:

what exactly didnt work?

.

you basically went on a rant about how you couldnt make up your mind, bought something and couldnt get it to work, and now will shun the company. but what for? its not their fault you didnt know what you wanted. reformatting the harddrive because of an after-market pci card? thats a little exessesive. if you put it in and something doesnt work- you take it out!

sorry if thats harsh, but its what you said. if you bought it, you cant get it to work, you dont hack at it for 3 days and then toss it out. if you did that with a 45$ video card, what will you do with a 200$ camera that you cant get to shoot images? bycott Nikon? it might just be the batteries. call technical support..or, since youre here already, ask for advice from others who might have used the hardware before.

[Message Edited]

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had a ati tv card worked fine for me except the sound was mono and watching tv put a 50-60% load on my 3.2 p4 1.5g system. Software encoding vs the card i got to replace it - the aforementioned Hauppauge PVR250 - hardware mpg2 encoding, stereo sound and wonderful image quality. The PVR software i use is SageTV by frey technologies. Wonderful Product.

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Phoon

Join Date 10/2001

+382

Gee DesignCaddy.. sounds like I stepped on your toes.

For starters, let me clarify a few things.
1 - I based the time consumption,and efforts on numerous posts throughout the internet in regards to this device. I tried every solution listed out there to get this card to work. ( try to watch tv locks up system and causes it to reboot ). I formatted my HD to rule out possible other software conflicts. That process in itself is food for an entirely different topic.

2 - The amount of people that cannot get this device to work is very large. My problem with ATI is that, based on what I have read, their tech support is useless on this device. So.. why do they continue to sell the product which fails to work on most systems today (running XP), and if they are going to sell it, why won't they develop software which properly works. Their other products may be fine. I am more of a NVIDIA supporter than anything else though, and this experience with an ATI product has left a very bad taste in my mouth.
And yes, if NIKKON made a camera that would not work with the primary operating system of today, and failed to provide good support for it.. you bet I would no longer buy Nikkon products.
It's simply asenine that so many manufactures and companies today just don't care about customer satisfaction like they should. There is always an alternative and if I am not satisfied with a product, I am free to boycott as I see fit.

As a conclusion to the story, which by the way, I primarily posted to provide a little chuckle to people, I am returning the card.

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WebGizmos

Join Date 09/2003

+735

I have a sony parked right next to my PC and it works like a charm! And there is no drain whatsoever on my cpu or anything else for that matter!

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CerebroJD

Join Date 01/2003

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not that you stomped on me, phoon, but you thrashed a good product and a good company and i don''t think you had a right to. i''ve used both the all in wonder 128 rage and the tv wonder, the latter which is sitting right next to my radeon. the only problems i have had with the series turned out to be a conflict with my computer''s default multimedia settings (spacifically the way windows engages video and audio). when the video tried to come up from the tuner, something would go wrong. i checked out the help file, visited the ati site, and changed a couple settings in windows to correct the problem. when i updated to the neweset driver, other quirky little problems dissaperaed as well. on the stand alone tv tuner, i''ve yet to have a problem- dispite it having to play nice with a radeon card, and my audigy card, and quicktime''s BS plug ins. i think if you had given ati a chance you''d find they can be very helpful, and you could have avoided unnecessary frustration.

i would make sure you have the latest drivers, and the CORRECT driver - the wonder series has a spacific driver to make it play nice with certain ati cards. if you have a different brand video card, you should be especially dilligent to check for a special driver, as two different brands might be competing for the same resources. make sure you are free of common hardware conflicts by going into your control panel >> system hardware, open up your display hardware and your sound hardware and check the IRQ''s.. make sure there are no conflicts. then, drop ATI an email and explain the problem.

you arn''t on a dell, are you?

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Phoon

Join Date 10/2001

+382

No, I'm not on a Dell. But I do have a GeForce2 MX 64M agp video card, AND a GeForce4 PCI video card.
Here is another twist to the gripe..
ATI advertises that the tv wonder is compatable with NVIDIA cards. Yes, I went through all the diagnostics.. irq's etc. All I ever got out of the card at best (using windvr as the ati media console would not work at all) was sound, but no video.
If I had a ATI base video card, I imagine the scenario might have been different.
I tried a variety of drivers as well, ranging from old to new.. all provided the same results.
You happen to be one of the lucky, and rare ones that got this card to work. Perhaps a blantant slamming of ati was out of order on my behalf. I do appologize for offending anyone with that remark. I will however, stick to Nvidia as it is my preference at this time.
No biggie anyway. I have a small 13" color tv in the PC room anyway....

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Jafo

Join Date 03/2001

+1845

I not that long ago got myself a Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP Deluxe....it had such a long name I figured it must be brilliant....

Worked a charm...no issues what-so-ever.....TV....FM...Remote control....all works.

Asus P4P800 deluxe...P4 3.0 multithread....gig of DDR 3200 400fsb.

If a product or company fails to live up to YOUR expectations then vote with your feet....

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I honestly don't think Phoon was out of line. His initial post wasn't much different in tone than your post about Mozilla/Firebird, DesignCaddy. As for ATI and technical support, I think it's outrageous, frankly, that one has to pay for technical support just to be able to install the brand new product. Unless you happen to be one of the lucky(?) few for whom ATI's tech support number is a local call, one either has the choice of paying long distance by the minute or pay a flat rate of $19.95 per call. There is no live online support at all. And the email support was a waste of time when I tried that, as it appeared to be canned responses based on keywords in my original query. Responses, I might add, which were unproductive in solving the problem. The bottom line for me, as I said in my last email to ATI, was that when I spend $200 on a product, I expect the manufacturer to stand behind it at least long enough to be able to install the card and see that it works.

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Well, I have a Radeon 9500 Pro, which I might add is incredible, but got a Hauppage PVR to watch TV on. The software is terrible but I just use Virtualdub anyway.

Athlon XP 2700...1GB of Corsair DDR400! Bwahahaha, no pagefile for me.

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that's off topic, but.. how did i bash firebird? i said i'd wait for the final version to try again

did you guys try EMAILING ati? its free... i do appologize i didn't realize they didn ot have internation toll free support. gotta be north america to get that.

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I have a real cheap soundblaster TV card and it worked like a wonder on my PIII 750 system.

But, I feel for you and your ATI problems. I've spent five days since sunday trying to configure my ATI card with my new Intel motherboard case, processor and ram. I've reformatted my hard drive five times already, and I just did it again. It's a beautiful clear blue case with fan lights and a super fast system. If only I can get it too work.

The only reason why I haven't lost five days on WC is because I'm house sitting for a friend and using her computer to type this. Right now, my system is like a beautiful car that won't run. Useless.

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Oh man. That sucks when it happens. My laptop comes with mobility radeon, and both ATI and Toshiba won't update the drivers. It's buggy as hell playing any movies.

I'm currently using a hacked up version of their so-called one for all drivers to make it work.

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