ATI TV Wonder....

[MuTTLeY]

I planning to buy the ATI TV Wonder.
Is this a good card, or not ??
It also can do real-time capturing to MPEG 1 & 2, is that better than capture to AVI ??

[Digitizer]

You have to be careful. ATI cards are picky about hardware they work with. They either work or they don't. The rule of thumb is that if you have a Voodoo card installed, TV Wonder will work fine. If not, you are taking chances. I happen to have this setup and I am extremely pleased with my PCI version (I guess you are talking about the new USB version). The picture is out of this world and I can capture at all resolutions through VDub. However, I might suspect that USB is going to be the bottleneck of your capturing abilities. I am usually using YUV12 codec (near 14 Megs/sec), afraid that can not be done with USB.
I exchanged Pinnacle's 200 dollar hardware encoder for this card because it's DC something barely worked on my PC, and it was USB (see above). I got TV Wonder for less than half the price and it has been an extremely cool companion

See CNets's user reviews for more info. Many guys mention their hardware setups. If you have a similar one and it works, definitely get it.

http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1110-418-3850079.html?tag=st.co.1110-404-3850079....10-418-3850079

Oh yeah, ATI software is the worst and the most unstable POS in the world, don't plan on using it. VCD player that my "wonder" comes with crashes every time I maximize it! We are not talking software though, it's hard to find a card that actually works for you in the first place.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Digitizer on 2002-01-09 17:55:25 ]</font>

[meandhers]

Can anyone tell me if the pci tv wonder would work good on a AMD k6/533 w/ a 32mb Nvidia Riva card???
What are the best proggies to use to capture?
Thanks

[Arkansas]

MuTTLeY, I think you would be better off with a Pinnacle PCTV. I have recently bought one, and in my opinion it's better than the TV Wonder. I got fewer drops with the Pinnacle than with the TV Wonder. If you want stereo tuner, get the Pro version. But if you only want to capture from composite/svideo in, the mono version will do.

[cyberiddler]

I just got one for christmas and the only problem I had was the quality, and bad support of AVI capture. I now use the virtualdub capture feature instead of ATI software and the quality is great. I do has dropped frames, but I think it is because I am running a Celeron 433mhz Gateway.