ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 Reviewed

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ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 Reviewed

Posted by michael on Saturday September 4, 2004 @09:07PM 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."

18 of 193 comments (clear)

The problem with external TV tuners... by francismacomber · 2004-09-04 21:14 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
1. Re:The problem with external TV tuners... by boaworm · 2004-09-04 21:19 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Agreed. I mean.. look at this quote:
  
  prefer an outboard piece of equipment instead of cracking open their case and dropping in a daughter board.
  
  Ok, exactly _how_ hard is it to open your case. Compared to all the trouble involved in getting new devices to work, setup programs etc. A really bad argument. I guess there might be a percentage or two of the population that cannot, and have noone to help them "cracking open their case...", but are those people likely to buy a TV-tuner anyway ? I have a BT878, just as the parent, and it works great.
  
  --
  Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
  Aristotele
2. Re:The problem with external TV tuners... by Hank+Chinaski · 2004-09-04 21:24 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Well, you forget all the notebook users. They just "crack open their case" when it falls from the starbucks cafe table on the marble floor.
  
  So for them external tv is nice of course.
  
  --
  IAAL
3. Re:The problem with external TV tuners... by DrEldarion · 2004-09-04 21:32 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  A percentage or two?! There are LOADS more than that who don't even know what "right-click" means, let alone how to open their computer and install a card. Most people think it's some horrible complicated process that they need to pay the people at CompUSA $50 to do.
4. Re:The problem with external TV tuners... by Curtman · 2004-09-04 21:38 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  I'm curious about the picture quality of this thing. I own a Hauppauge WinTV, and two ATI All In Wonder cards, and I have to say the AIW cards blow the Hauppauge out of the water when it comes to picture quality. The Hauppauge has a pretty grainy picture, and when CPU usage is high, it drops frames big time.
  
  Of course being a Linux user, my primary concern is driver support. On that front, the Hauppauge wins easily. The driver is part of the standard Linux kernel, and capture support is fantastic. In order to watch TV on the All In Wonder I have to compile my X server with Gatos which takes about 3 hours to do, and there is sometimes quite a bit of lag between a XFree/Xorg release, and support from Gatos. I've never been able to capture video with it, but I'm not really interested in doing that, so I'll blame myself for that. Others seem to be doing it just fine. There is some pretty exciting talk about merging Gatos into Xorg on the mailing list, and I'm hoping all goes well with that effort.
  
  I'll admit to not having read TFA, but I searched it for Linux, and didn't find it mentioned. Anyone have one of these things, and is it useable?
5. Re:The problem with external TV tuners... by Tlosk · 2004-09-04 22:42 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I have a couple of machines, and while opening up the case and installing a PCI card is rather trivial, I don't want to buy cards for every single machine, nor do I want to open two cases and switch a card everytime I want to do some video work on a different machine than where the card currently is.
  
  The one machine household is becoming a rarity these days.
6. Re:The problem with external TV tuners... by LiquidCoooled · 2004-09-04 22:42 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I saw something quite remarkable the other day.
  
  A set of jump leads for a car.
  Nothing special there you might think, but these were jump leads from cig lighter to cig lighter.
  The claimed benefits included not having to get under the hood, and not getting dirty.
  
  Thinking outside the box is not always a bad idea, I can think of many many people who wouldn't know what the battery in their car even looked like. Sure this isn't for everyone, and purists would shudder at the thought, but its a product that has a market.
  
  With usb2, and firewire as standards for moving video data around, why should we worry about having to risk damaging the computer by opening it up?
  
  One other aspect to it, how can I crack open my computer and put in a tv card if I bought a tiny silent desktop, or a laptop computer that has no room for expansion?
  
  Using usb/firewire is much more expansive and practical than your closed view.
  I'm pleased your internal card works and your happy with it, but just because your happy/comfortable/able to install the card internally doesn't mean everyone else is.
  
  --
  liqbase :: faster than paper
7. Re:The problem with external TV tuners... by PhotoGuy · 2004-09-04 23:18 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  There are differences between Hauppage cards, too. The PVR-250/350 line have hardware encoding, very high quality. There are two different versions of their USB product, one spits out direct MPEG, and I suspect is better than the one that doesn't (I had the latter, and it was disappointing.)
  
  After being a MythTV user for a year or so, I'm amazed this type of thing isn't pretty much ubiquitous among Linux geeks such as muchself.
  
  --
  Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
USB 2 can give good video by SalsaDot · 2004-09-04 21:29 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 :)
Mac/Linux? by Trurl's+Machine · 2004-09-04 21:32 · 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?
1. Re:Mac/Linux? by Mr.G5 · 2004-09-04 21:54 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  You sould look at the Elgato EyeTV, it has a FireWire interface and a hardware-based MPEG2 encoder so it doesn't bog down your processor. The best thing is that the software is written exclusively for the Mac so it doesn't have that ported-at-the-last-second feel to it.
Drivers by robpoe · 2004-09-04 21:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

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...
closed captioning support by jaxdahl · 2004-09-04 21:42 · 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?
There are more by Teun · 2004-09-04 21:44 · Score: 5, Informative

This is what I bought 3 weeks ago:
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."
Re:A good TV-card under Linux by soccerisgod · 2004-09-04 21:52 · Score: 4, Informative

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?
Poor review. No hardware encoding is a feature? by tachyonflow · 2004-09-04 22:48 · 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!
These guys opinion went right in the toilet by ChadAmberg · 2004-09-04 23:13 · Score: 4, Informative

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...
Re:Why the hell is it a "daughter board"? by donscarletti · 2004-09-04 23:37 · Score: 5, Funny

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).
It should be called an oedipus board. Because it is a child that inserts its male connector into its motherboard.
That was possibly the worst thing I have ever posted.

--
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem