Tv Wonder HD 600 USB Stick
from: VISIONTEK MASS STORAGE
List Price: $163.20
Prices subject to change.
Your Price: $91.87
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Electronics : Tv Wonder HD 600 USB Stick |
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Rating:  - * Kind of works, but software and drivers are junk ... I decided to give this tuner a try and was sorely disappointed. On a very basic level it does work with the included software and provides decent picture quality. Unfortunately I was met with the following problems: 1) It doesn't crop analog pictures correctly, so you get a messy bar of junk at the top of the image for about 1/20 of the picture's height. It's not a huge deal, but quite annoying. 2) The Catalyst Media Center software that it comes with is extremely basic and often lets scheduled recordings go by without actually recording them. Very disappointing. ATI denied any knowledge of this problem, but I found evidence of other people having the same difficulty on VisionTek's product forums. 3) Trying to get the H.264 compression to work was a real pain. After a lot of troubleshooting, I finally discovered that their encoder just doesn't handle B frames correctly. You have to turn those off or you get a trippy, jerky image when you play back the result. 4) When I switched back and forth between different compression settings, the software would often screw up and keep only the top quarter of the image, cutting off the rest. 5) It takes nearly a full minute for the TV tuner to fire up and work when you first bring up the software. That might not sound so bad, but it's a long time when you're just sitting there waiting. 6) The drivers are completely incompatible with third party applications. I wanted to be able to use the composite input for recording video through another program since their Catalyst Media Center was so disappointing. Well, trying any software that uses the old VFW (video for windows) interface resulted in a blue screen of death and a glorious crash. Trying to use applications that support the more modern WDM/DirectShow interface I was able to get a preview of the video, but no sound unless I plugged it into my sound card, and then the recordings came out at a startling 0.25 frames per second! Yes, you read that right, the image in the recorded video would only update every 4 seconds or so. I tried more than one application and got the same results in every case. So, if you are content to struggle along with ATI's weak-sauce software and use this thing for just the bare-bones functionality, maybe it will be alright for you. Otherwise, I would advise that you steer clear of this product since the drivers do not support either of the standard interfaces that any third party video-capture application would need to use to communicate with it. After a frustrating exchange with their technical support, I was basically told, "We don't care. It works with our application and that's all we gaurantee." As you probably guessed, I'm back out on the market for another device. Rating:  - * Not happy ... Full disclosure: I am not a computer expert, nor do I pretend to be (so don't expect any computer jargon), but I know when a product is user-friendly, and I don't find that to be so with this ATI TV Wonder. I have been playing with it, un/re-installing it, and to no avail. The user guide offers no real help to a first-timer, and the package comes w/a very confusing graphic that supposedly shows your different connection options. I found none of them to work for what I needed. I think I'm going to send it back b/c I could get no real support over the phone, and there's no PDF manual for this particular model. ETA: I did manage to get one channel, but no more. Rating:  - * Very Good, not sure why i took it back. ... This item worked perfect, had no problems with vista media center, i've used pinnacle, hauppauge tuners and they all have problems with vista, like my graphics driver would flicker, this one worked perfect. Im not quite sure why i took it back i got a major deal on it, guess i didnt feel the need for hdtv on my laptop. but if i can find it again for the price i paid or less i will purchase it again just because in a year or so there will be tons more Dtv channels. Rating: - * Works Great! ... I didn't have the problems that the other reviewers seem to be having. The device loaded correctly and pulls in my OTA signals just fine. The CPU usage is just over 3% while receiving signals on an Athlon X2 3800+. The fact that you can pick up both analog and digital signals is pretty cool! Rating:  - * S/W difficult to install/crashes ... Catalyst S/W difficult to install. I never got digital stations through the Catalyst Media Center, the program would crash when it searched for digital stations. Tuner seems to work OK in Windows Media, although many of the digital stations aren't list (or found?). |
