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ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 Reviewed
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."
My roommates constantly want to borrow it. I was so much happier with my BT878 internal card.
Sometimes portability isn't such a good thing.
Wow, you don't read the whole post do you? No.... so... Do you happen to know some place where I can go and hide until everyone forgot this years stupidest post?
I've got an AverMedia USB 2 external tv tuner. Its nicely made and does deliver good video over USB2 HOWEVER I'm disappointed with the fact that:
:)
- it uses the PC sound card for the audio
meaning more cables, a little clipping as
my laptop only has a mic level input and less
than perfect sync. All that USB2 bandwidth and
they dont use it for the audio???
- All the PVR software I've tried (apart than
the buggy software that comes with it) is unable
to control the tuner, though if the card is
alredy set to a channel it feeds the other PVRs
OK.
I wanted to setup a TV server for a short while. I ended up connecting the AverMedia to a VCR to guarantee the channel would not lost when the PC rebooted (VERY likely with Windows Media Encoder
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?
So, the review shows screen shots. I think there should be a sentence at the end of EVERY review for us Linux users -
"This device DOES/DOES NOT have drivers for Linux available/in the package/on the website".
That way - we dont have to hunt it down, and we know right away which companies to support.
= Grow a brain...
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?
Pinnacle PCTV USB2.0
and am very happy with.
Very small (pack of sgarettes)
Powered through the USB port
Comes with a remote
Sensitive antenna input
Important for the traveller it will do PAL, NTSC, SECAM.
Good software
But so far no luck on Linux...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Important question: Where do you live? Does the area have any kind of digital tv? If so, I'd go for a dvb solution - eliminates the need of encoding your recording, just gotta grab the mpeg stream and save it on the harddisk.
To see what cards are supported in general (analog and digital), a visit to Gerd Knorr's website bytesex.org might be in order...
I personally have two Hauppauge cards, one for normal analog cable and one for DVB-t. The windows drivers are a joke, but they work well in linux...
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
I'm sorry, the quality of that review was appalling. Why on earth does the author suggest connecting it to a receiver box, when the whole point is to allow TV on the go? What sort of person carries a receiver unit to their hotel? This is, of course, ignoring the fact that the TV Wonder is actually a receiver unit anyway.
And again, he criticises the quality of using co-ax cabling to get the TV signal to the box. Does he have any better suggestions? Wireless? ESP, perhaps. I think this reviewer needs to think very hard about what this unit was actually designed to do, before leaping in and criticising it. I didn't even bother to read the rest of the review - if he doesn't know what he's talking about in the first half, he won't in the second, either.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Do you happen to know some place where I can go and hide until everyone forgot this years stupidest post?
You can join me under this rock over here. Yeah, I'm under here for my post being modded down to hell when it wasn't really all that Trollish (and it certainly wasn't Redundant (as was originally modded), being the second or third (maybe fourth) post -- none of the before ones had any relation to mine).
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
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!
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!
Once they started the "monster cable is worth it" crap. While using something like 12 over 24 guage cable might make a difference, these guys are on serious crack if they think 40$ cable is better than 10$.
They must have that psychological problem of paying more so they think it works better issue, even though independent tests show no difference.
I think I'll want to sell them the 200$ penis enlarger instead of the 15$ one...
Daughter board has been used to describe a board you plug into the main board for a long time. I first heard it about 20 years ago.
That was possibly the worst thing I have ever posted.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
And when he says that "component video (...) separates the video across red, green and blue" he probably meant YCrCb luminance-chrominance signals (unless the device has a SCART interface as well, which doesn't seem to be the case).
He doesn't touch upon how good it grabs crappy signal from cable TV, nor how fast the channels change. He doesn't even review the TiVO-esque function.
I think this is a 1/2 ass review that totally misses the point of having this device, which is being able to use your computer like a normal TV, which includes flipping through the channels. Just lazy!
So there are issues where a PCI / AGP card become much harder to add.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
um, NEXT! But seriously, if this isn't USB powered, then it is absolutely no good for a notebook traveler. I can see wanting to catch some local tv while out of pocket, but to carry around this, an antenna, and a wall wart. Too much kit. I know Hauppauge has a USB one that is USB powered. Even if the quality is just ok, it would be a better solution.
Well, granted it's $300, but the Formac Studio TVR is firewire. It's for Mac OS X only, though, so those without Macs are out of luck.