ATI HDTV Wonder Skipping

[Torrential]

I have the ATI HDTV Wonder Card. The signal strength I get is great, 4/5 or 5/5. I get many channels. But i'm having one problem--when I'm watching the TV it skips a lot and isn't consistant. The audio is fine, it's just the video. And then I try to record, it's the same way it was when I was watching it, kind of skippy. Any suggestions?

I'm using the ATI MultiMedia Center software.

Computer--
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
1gb Ram
ATI All In Wonder Graphics Card
ATI HDTV Wonder

[mikiem]

Might check the signal etc. in your area... Signal strength may be good but signal may be getting interupted or damaged I imagine. AFAIK the one big problem with broadcast HD worldwide.

[edDV]

DTV HD is ~ 19Mb/s.

If you only have one drive, consider adding a second and capturing to the separate drive from the OS. The OS will assert priority on its drive.

Also minimize backgound processes during capture.

[xxiangg]

Did you get problems for both SD and HD, or HD only? I sometime
got similar problem for HD program. My impression is that machine
is still not powerful enough to do real time software decoding and
the decoding software is still buggy after running for a while, even
though the CPU load is only about 50%. I have tried to capture HD
program in background in .tp format (and turn the real time decoding/
display off). If I convert .tp to MPEG in its native resolution, then play
the converted MPEG, I see similar problems. But if I convert .tp to
DVD (reducing its resolution and bit rate), the resulting DVD is fine.

[Torrential]

I do only have one hard drive, so that may be the problem. It only does this on HD Channels, SD is fine. But, the choppyness is very consistent, about every eight seconds it does this.

[Torrential]

ok - i reinstalled the OS. Every channel works perfectly, except the WB, which is the main reason why I bought this card. I wanted the WB HD. Thats the only channel that doesn't work very well, it skips and chops every 1 second. Since every other channel works perfectly im assuming that theres no computer related issues, just signal strength, etc. However, before I reinstalled the OS, It only chopped every eight seconds so I don't know whats wrong with this channel. I've seen some reviews saying that this card has trouble on 1080i channels, but other channels are 1080i and they work. I don't know what's wrong, please help

[edDV]

Look up your address in

http://www.antennaweb.org

and figure out the distance and direction to the transmitter. It could be you need a more directional antenna or if the station is close, you may need an attenuator.

[Justin42]

Try getting the WatchHDTV app. I suspect the 'skipping' you're mentioning is a variation of the black-out bug many of us have noticed (check the forums at avsforums.com or rage3d.com). The WatchHDTV app, while bare-bones looking, can do pretty much everything ATI's MMC can do (albeit a bit clunkier) but works so much better!

software home
http://mysite.verizon.net/watchhdtv/home/

AVSForum thread
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=590020