for all those who just bought or going to buy ATI TV wonder

[James_T_Kirk]

I bought a TV wonder VE and it SUCKED on my XP system I wrestled with the damn thing for three days before I took it back to Circuit City. I bought a WinTV at Circuit city for the same price and Just brought it home and within ten minutes everything was installed the channels were scanned and guess what! IT WORKS PERFECTLY!!!

So for all those having probs with ATI TV WONDER VE - GO BUY WINTV and kiss your troubles good bye. thank you very much

[Anonymous65]

Ahmen to that!
You cannot go wrong with a WinTV card...

[#1Newbie]

Rgr that. I bought an ATI TV WONDER VE card at Best Buy about 3 months ago. It worked wonderful when I had Win ME but when I switched to XP it was a full load of troubles. I have tried everything and It doesn't wrk. I dled 3rd party drivers to fix the initializing video error and then I had props with the MMC 7.1 crap recognizing my coax input. I tried power vcr 2 and that wrks wonderful expcept I have the trial and I don't want to pay 129bucks fo the full version. (I don't like to rip companies off by downloading cracks and full versions either). Try anything except that crap card Ati puts out. It's not only XP, I hear Win2k has probs with the card too. And I read on ATI's website that they aren't planning to create a XP Fix anytime soon either. I say trash that company. Too many complaints and their tech support suxors too.

This is a warning to all who use xp. It does wrk wonders with ME but that Windows suxs compared to XP so.. Your choice.

Best regards,

#1NewBie

[Anonymous65]

For people who wants a cheap legal copy of powerVCRII, check out eBay. I got a copy for $30.

[Barky]

Holy cow! Three Days?

A couple of years ago I had so many problems with ATI @%#$ that I swore I'd never go that route again. . . needless to say, I acquired a new TV wonder VE for free recently, and thought I'd give it a try.

I read every link I could find before trying the install, and followed all of the advice of those who have gone before. I installed it, turned it on, got all of the normal conflicts, errors and freeze-ups, pulled the card out and flushed it.

[SteveDVD]

Same Thing happend to me!!!!! TV Wonder VE Stinks!

[vhelp]

hello all.

hmmm, I have the ATW pci card (not the VE) in my system:
* XP 1700+
* its on the 2nd to last slot, furthest away from powersupply.
* is on IRQ 5, shared w/ my USB but I almost always have ~7
frame drop, but usually these days, I have 1 or 0 framedrops
capping at 352x480

A loooonnnngggg time ago, I started out w/ this same card (year ago)
and just like you's all, I chucked it out of my system and tried
half a dozen more card down the road. I came back to it later,
and for what ever reason, it started working again. Problably
because I had moved it to another slot that wasn't causing me as
many griefs as previously before.

I use this card like a powerhouse, only i can't capture higher than
352x480, ie, 704x480 w/out dropping frames like flies. But, 352x480
captures are awsome! And, my encodes prove such. You can see some
sample clips I post every day from this card. I guess I didn't
give up so easily. I do have the Wintv GO card as well, but for
now, I capture w/ my ATW card on my main pc here, and send the AVI
files to my networked pc 2nd, for encoding to VCD/SVCD, etc.

VHELP's Samples - updated daily or so... LAST: 06.06.02

-vhelp

[The village idiot]

After a couple of months of messing around with a TV Wonder I finally have it working well. At least for my purpose, that being recording shows from cable at atleast 352x480 for half DVD. The secret was a couple of things.

#1 load win2000 or XP so that there are no shared IRQ's

#2 iuVCR ---> the only thing that allowed this card to capture at x480 properly.

Now all I have to do is get a MUCH bigger hard drive to hold the AVI (either uncompressed or best huffyuv setting). Maybe I'll try a good mjpeg codec. It does suck that it will not go straight to mpeg, but at least I can get the things I want with the most quality the source can provide.

[James_T_Kirk]

Well my WinTV captures at an easy 640x480 without any dropped frames that I can tell - I even use the software it came with to do it - as it seems to work better than Vdub(go figure) Vdub has alot more options but it seeme to freeze up - I dont know why but oh well the wintv 2000 program works great! I use the divx codec to capture to get the best file size then i convert to mpeg and burn it onto a cd and watch it on my dvd player - takes longer than recording it on VCR but no commercials. It looks just as good as it did the first time around on cable so i am happy

[jolo]

My story with my ATI All In Wonder card (Radeon 7500) is that I have NEVER) been able to get the TV working without it the program freezing (not the computer freezing).

The last support person told me that I should reformat and reinstall my WinMe.

[Vermeer]

I have a TV wonder card which performed well under 98SE but required a LOT of time and tweaking to get it to work properly. I recently reconfigured my system with win 2k and ntfs mainly for the stability and the unlimited file size. Win 2k has made a world of difference for my setup. Using the open source drivers, I can capture avi's to the raid array from my satellite feed at 640x480 using the picvideo codec and Vdub while outputting previously encoded vcd files(from primary drive or cd) to the tv from my Xcard with Tmpgenc encoding(albeit slowly) previously captured avi's in the background. The ATI card does work well under the right conditions.

[jolo]

That ATI card is one sensitive little bugger.

Also i find their web site and their support extremely lacking.

Also, if you ever sent an e-mail to their tech support, you get a canned e-mail back with hyperlinks to their web site.

Uggh.

Wish I could give it back and get a "less sensitive" one.

In a PS, I just finished reinstalling the latest version of Direct X 8.1, uninstalled all ATI drivers, made sure they were removed from the registry, installed their latest drivers, everything worked, except .... the TV Tuner.

Grrrr, have spent too much time on this.

Thanks for your note. Maybe formating and reinstalling Win Me will help.

Jolo (Jon)

[O@kfan]

Has anyone here thought about updating the drivers? For the ATI TV wonder VE .Cause at Ati's site the new drivers for that card comes with better capturing software, you CAN save your video to MPEG1 and MPEG2.

I feel its the BEST TV capture card for price (after updating the drivers at Ati's Site)

Good Value, Great Preformance!

I highly recommend it!

I'm running an Athlon 1ghz with 128ram and have NO frame loss saving to MPEG1 or MPEG2

[jolo]

For O@kfan,

I'm really happy for you O@kfan, that your all-in wonder works so well for you.

I agree with you as a former PC tech support person, we wouldn't talk to anyone unless they had the latest drivers installed.

In my case, I have the latested drivers, have a Duron 800MH system with 384MG of RAM. But, all applications work for me , except, the one I really need, the TV which freezes (the app, not the PC). Been very frustated also , buy the lack of knowledge of their tech support staff as well as their web site. But that is my experience so I can only discuss my experience.

For me, you find out what a company is REALLY like when things fail, not when they go smooth. I have the most loyalty for firms whose customer support staff bailed my out of tough situations.

O@kfan, good to hear some balance on where there are some experiences where the all-in-wonder card works fine.

Jolo (Jon).

I