ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0

[Coluph]

Does anyone have the ATI TV WONDER USB 2.0 and if so...are you happy with it?

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

I've had good luck with my all in wonder but I've moved to a laptop and I'm looking for a portable solution to watch TV, and capture video tapes while away from home.

The specs on ATI's web site are very vague, and no local retailers carry it which makes me suspicious if its a good product or not.

Does this have the theatre chip in it or is this based on the old TV Wonder VE which is only suitable for making VCD's.

The alternative is a Haupauge, or MSI...the MSI seems to cheaply priced to be considered...has to be something wrong at that price, and I hear the haupauge software isn't so great and requires media edition XP.

[edDV]

The real issue is hardware encoding support especially with a laptop. I'm not sure of the tech in the ATI TV WONDER USB 2.0 but I suspect if it had the Theater 200 chip, we would have heard about it.

The Hauppage PVR USB2 is a full hardware MPeg2 encoder. Other external solutions exist.
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_pvrusb2.html

Correction: I dug out the specs and the ATI TV WONDER USB 2.0 does have the Theater 200 chip but that only takes about half the encoding load. If you have a faster laptop, this may work.
http://www.ati.com/products/tvwonderusb20/index.html

Both the ATI and Hauppage cards are NTSC tuners only. If you travel widely, you might want one that can tune PAL as well.

[FulciLives]

On a whim I bought the ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 at Best Buy because it was on sale for $60 or $70 instead of the usual Best Buy price of $100

This was back around May or June 2005

I tried to capture some VHS tapes. These were home made SP and SLP/EP recorded tapes ... all from a friend that wanted them converted. The device went "crazy" and would not record from any of the tapes I was trying to use. The tapes were not "stable" enough I guess because as a test I recorded a DVD to a VHS tape using a DVD player that outputs a copy free signal thus giving me a rock solid VHS SP recording. This tape it was able to capture from which is why I say it must not like "unstable" tapes. The device also will not copy from copy protected video sources.

All in all I was very unhappy with the deive and the quality of the VHS I could capture from was not very good and had a lot of MPEG compression errors.

It's junk if you ask me.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Coluph]

hmmm...ok so its seeming that maybe the ATI with the software encoding might not be the best thing for a portable computer then. I will take a look at the haupauge (or however you spell that) as its available locally without having to mail order it. I've just become a bit of a fan with the ATI capturing software so I'm hesitant to try something else.

[edDV]

hmmm...ok so its seeming that maybe the ATI with the software encoding might not be the best thing for a portable computer then. I will take a look at the haupauge (or however you spell that) as its available locally without having to mail order it. I've just become a bit of a fan with the ATI capturing software so I'm hesitant to try something else.

Someday they'll make an external Theater 550 model.

[FulciLives]

Do what I did ... buy it from BEST BUY and if you are unhappy as I was ... return it.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Mistress Diana]

I too am trying to tsf homemade VHS tapes to my computer to eventually put on DVD discs and the USB ATI Wonder things was recommended to me at Circuit City. Bought it, installed everything on Laptop, all it did was drop frames and work lousy, put it on my new PC, probs, could not get support online, finally after 3 days of busy signals got phone supposrt and discovered it was not compatible with Win XP Media Ctr. They made no other suggestions, I returned it and bought something else. My personal opinion of ATI support is all but non existent and product is not worth buying