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ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 Reviewed

Posted by michael on from the boob-tube dept.

An anonymous reader writes "ViperLair reviews the ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0, a sort of low-rent option for those you want to add a TV tuner or video-in to their machines, but would prefer an outboard piece of equipment instead of cracking open their case and dropping in a daughter board."

6 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Mac/Linux? by Trurl's+Machine · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't want to troll with obligatory "will it work with Linux" or "imagine a Bewulf cluster of these", I'm sincerely interested. As a long-time iMac/iBook user, I always in theory enjoyed the idea that I don't need to open the case of my machine just to get something done, but I was always frustrated that my only way to capture TV on my computer was a quite cumbersome setup involving a DV camera with video input. I was always interested in a device like this, but of course the PCI solutions were not for me, and USB 1.1 was just too slow for anything serious. Should this thingy be anyhow supported by MacOS X with USB 2.0, I'd purchase one right away. Hints, anyone?

  2. closed captioning support by jaxdahl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Will it record closed captions and play them back when video is played back? Are other tv tuner hardware & software combos able to do this? This is why I still have a tv and vcr .. what about dvd recorders? Will these record captions too or not?

  3. Why the hell is it a "daughter board"? by rtilghman · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This is the first time I have ever seen an aux PCI board referred to with the adjective "daughter", am I alone?

    I understand the continuation of the "motherboard" concept here, but daughter board makes absolutely no sense in my mind. Sure, the child analogy fits, but the "daughter" board has a PCI connector that is INSERTED into the motherboard. In every other application I have EVER seen this is referred to as a "male" connector (a female being a receiver connector into which the male is inserted).

    Maybe I'm being a "right brain word fetishist", but did this description strike anyone else as odd?

    -rt

  4. different cables by lucas+teh+geek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    am I the only one who couldnt spot the difference in quality between the different cables? they make the claim s-video is best of the three, and from my own experiences connecting an xbox up to a big tv different ways, id say s-video does look better but those screnshots show no difference. is this something that would make a difference if i could see the moving pictures or are they just jackasses paying for more expensive cables when the bottleneck in quality is not the cables carrying the signal?

    --
    TIAEAE!
    1. Re:different cables by gunpowder · · Score: 2, Interesting

      am I the only one who couldnt spot the difference in quality between the different cables?

      Yes, it is difficult to tell, but if you really look closely, you'll see a difference in the quality of the pictures. A good way to find out it to open each picture (1, 2, 3) in a browser-tab (not in a new window); then flip between the tabs and you'll notice the difference.

      In the coax picture you'll notice the 'color bleed' and distortions: on the face (cheek, mouth) of the referee, and on his left arm (especially when compared to the composite picture). Finally the s-video screenshot is slighly sharper and has more contrast (ie. not as blurred) as the other pictures, as you can see if you look at the audience on the right side

  5. Poor review. No hardware encoding is a feature? by tachyonflow · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I agree with another poster that this is not a very good review.

    The author advises against the use of the coax input. I think it's obvious that anybody with a digital cable box or satellite recevier will be using s-video or composite inputs to this device. Those of us with analog cable or antenna (without a cable box) will use the coax input, of course.

    Referring to component video as "aka RCA" is a bit confusing. Component video may use RCA plugs (I've never had a component setup; I'm just guessing), but so does composite video.

    The device apparantly does not have video compression hardware onboard, and the reviewer regards this as a feature, because "most of today's PC video compression parts still need work." I, for one, would much rather have an onboard MPEG2 video encoder (an MPEG4 encoder would be even sweeter, but these don't seem to quite be commodity parts yet.) I'm not sure why the reviewer regards video encoding hardware to be sub-par, but I've had excellent results with my PVR350. Not perfect, but much better than dropping frames when my computer is too busy doing something else to service a capture interrupt (*). I was actually pretty disappointed to realize that the device's advertised "capture video in MPEG4 format" actually just meant that they would supply software for the encoding.

    (* I suppose that since this is a USB device, raw video would be captured as a stream instead of via capture framebuffer interrupts, but I could still think of better things to do with my CPU cycles and USB bandwidth.)

    This review of a review brought to you by: being awake at 4:30am!