Is ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 as good as ATI AIW cards?

[hhamzeh]

Hi all,

ATI has introduced a new TV Wonder USB 2.0 to the market. Their website says that it uses ATI theater 200 tecnology. Does this mean that its quality should be as good as ATI AIW cards which use the same chipset? Any body has tried this card yet. It is US$99. Thanks for your input.

[dun4cheap]

It will be my next TV Tuner, unless they release the new 500 chip on the USB2. The quality from what I have ready is very good. I have been waiting for it to hit the market in full scale.

[hhamzeh]

dun4cheap,

I could not find any review on this card. Where did you read about the quality of the card?

[dun4cheap]

www.rage3d.com

[hhamzeh]

thanks dun4cheap,
I tried the site you mentioned. As you said, everybody is excited about this card, but nobody has tried the card yet. Hopefully, someone does soon.

[dun4cheap]

Actually, there was a link to a write up on it. It has been tested, and the results were really good. You may want to search the site more.

[lordsmurf]

In theory, I would assume so. If I see one at Fry's, I'll give it a test spin.

[lacywest]

Here are some links for review

http://www.ati.com/products/tvwonderusb20/

http://www.viperlair.com/reviews/multimedia/ati/tvwond/usb2/

http://news.designtechnica.com/article3546.html

http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=716

http://www.overclockersclub.com/?read=8325216

[trock]

Does the ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 include a hardware MPEG-2 encoder or does it use software encoding? I've scoured the reviews and the ATI site and nowhere is this mentioned. All it says is that it features MPEG 1/2 and 4 compression.

Does the fact that it uses the Theater 200 technology automatically mean that it includes a hardware encoder? Thanks.

trock

[Anonymous65]

No, the unit does not have a hardware mpeg encoder, the mpeg encoding is done in software.

[trock]

Ah, thanks.

[hhamzeh]

lordsmurf has a lot of experience on ATI cards and in his website, he mentioned that ATI All in Wonder cards that have the same cheapset (theater 200), use a form of hybrid hardware-software encoding on MPEG. So, it may not be pure hardware encoding, but it is not pure software encoding either.

[Sulik]

The problem with all USB devices is that they all require extra cpu in order to transfer data over the USB bus (much higher overhead than AGP or PCI-based capture devices).

[Skiffer]

A few years back I became interested in video capture, so I decided to buy a capture device. I didn't know too much about it at the time, so I bought an external Dazzle unit, dunno the number. It didn't last more than a few months before the thing sucked too much juice outta the wall or something, and fried. Wouldn't turn on, wouldn't capture. Fast forward a few years, and I decided to try my luck again. Back when I got the Dazzle box, I wanted an external box because the inside of my computer was already full of other cards and cables, and I suppose this kinda carried over, because I decided to get another external box, this time with a USB connector (old Dazzle box was parallel port). At first I was just going to buy a cheapo kit, until I started doing my homework. Up until then I was really an amateur (still am, really), but I quickly found out that if it wasn't USB2, it wasn't worth it. So I made a search of all the new USB2 devices, read reviews, and compared features. I finally settled on the ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0, as it had a modest price ($90 US), and mostly the array of features I wanted. I can't say I regret the decision. After it arrived in the mail, I started experimenting with the box and the software, looking to tweak the best performance out of it. I started looking online for the most effective tools to use in conjunction with it, and that search led me first to www.doom9.org, then to www.digitalFAQ.com, and finally to here.

Now, you may not have been interested in my personal history, but if I had to wait 2 days to post, then you have to wait a minute to read this. :P

Anyway, the ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 works very well. I've looked at all the advice on LordSmurf's site (great site, thanks for the info, btw), but I prefer to capture at 704x480 instead of 352x480 at 3Mb/s and above. 704 gives me smoother, less jaggy lines. Under 3Mb/s, however, the higher reso becomes more a liability than an asset, so I drop to 352x480.

I've been capturing for about 2 weeks now and gone through about 40 hours of captured data with no dropped frames that I am aware of. USB devices are supposed to heavier on CPU usage, but then again, right before I got the box I upgraded to an AMD XP3200+, 512 pc3200 DDRAM. Capturing 704x480 at 6Mbs while running 3 or 4 other apps, I'm still only hitting around 75% CPU usage.

If anyone is interested or has space to host them, I have some clips from my first real test capture/dvd burn. The clips are from a TV recording (analog cable TV source) of Lost in Space on TBS run through a generic 30' coax from the wall to the ATI device. They were capped at 704x480 at 6Mb/s with ATI MMC (videosoap, combo filter 1 = %100). They were then passed through TMPEnc to recode (sorta) at the same 6Mb/s to fix a GOP error that kept popping up with TDA. (The TMPGEnc recode didn't seem to visibly hurt the image quality, but the process took 7.5 hours for a 90 minute movie, so who knows *what* it did.) Since then, I've found a few workarounds that prevent me from having to recode through TMPGEnc again.

Conclusion: Despite the bad rep that USB devices get (deservedly so, for USB 1.1 devices), the ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 works perfectly well for me and is well worth the money spent, especially since it can easily be used on laptops with a USB 2.0 port as well as desktop computers.

If you'd like to see either of the clips (or better for me, host them for others), message me or post here and I'll see if I can UL them. I don't know if anyone cares, though. :P

Both clips are as heavy action as I could find in a quick search. Clip 1 = 40s / 32MB and Clip 2 = 92s / 72MB.

PS - About the only thing I haven't tested is capturing to lossless AVI. I'm not sure if the USB 2.0 port is up to that bandwidth (though I think they're supposed to be able to handle up to 40Mb/s, no?). It hasn't been an issue for me largely because I'm working on a 30GB partition, and the quality of the MPEG2 files are just fine for me.