How to properly install your ATI TV Wonder

[Jayloki]

This thing is aging me quickly

Had it working added some other codecs screwed it up. Can't get the original software cd to work now....sighh...frikken ATI!!!!

Can anyone please explain in simple steps how to properly install the drivers and the media control centre withou the card going off into "wacko" land??


I reformatted to clean everythign out. Installed the wdm drivers or whatever first without the card installed like it says to do. Shutdown, installed tv wonder ( pci) ( oh by the way Im using a radeon 8500 as my main card) it detected it fine installed the rest of the media center thingy and there. All is well. Click on the tv thing go thru the first steps until I hit the "auto scan the channels" stuff and boom.. Nothing. No channels scrolling by in the little box or anything. It just stays there and I have to "x" out of it.

Can anyone shed some light on what's not right here?? ( besides ATI's obvious lack of programming skills??)

Thanx all.

-Jay-

[presto]

I'm sorry for getting your hopes up and then not having the answer you want. I'm just angry at ATI and feel like adding my two cents to your post. I spent months trying to get an ATI AIW Radeon card to work in a computer that as far as I have heard is more than up to the job. You never know if you have things installed properly because there are all these different parts and when you install a new one you are supposed to uninstall the old one but I can't do that because my computer installs the drivers automatically when it reboots!

I gave up and went out and bought the next card up AIW Radeon 7500 and I still can't get it to work. Of course it doesn't have the same problems. I was happy at first that the old problems seem to be gone but low and behold up crop a bunch of new problems and I still can't use this thing.

ATI has the worst customer service of any company I have ever dealt with. I suspect they must have put me on some kind of "ignore" list because I don't even get replies from them anymore.

[Jayloki]

Presto: That's ok. Sometimes its just good to get the frustration out Misery loves company

Tonight I had a break thru though. I installed some 3rd party drivers ( since what I hear from the majority of ATI owners out there) Ati drivers suck at best. And whaddaya know? It works pretty good. I don't use the media thingy that came with the card.

I installed the wdm drivers first like you are supposed to, then I used the 3rd paty drivers. It uninstalls some files but then enhances some of the others. I then installed a tiny program called IUVCR. That's the program I use to record avi's and such. I heard it mentioned from a few poeple in other newsgroups and such and thought what the heck!?

Sure enough after a bit of configuring and whatnot, I could capture video and audio from my vcr at rates higher then allowed with the crappy media player that came with the tv wonder card. The TV tuner part is slightly off ( channels don't match the actual channel numbers but I suspect that due to the settings I chose during the installation process. A bit of tweaking should fix it but at least I can record from my vcr and that's my main isuue.

Give it a shot too. you can get the 3rd party wdm drivers from here:

http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/index.html

and you can pick up the IUVCR program here:
http://www.iulab.com/

I hope this can help out. Until ATI gets their act together...this will have to do for now

-Jay-

[presto]

Well I guess I'll have to follow your route but I really like the mulitmedia center and guide + software because I want to use my computer like a TiVo. At one point I had it sort of working. I found two settings that worked for capture. But I had all sorts of other bugs like blue dots on the screen when playing back DVD's or when using TV on Demand and occasional crashes. So I went out and bought the AIW Radeon 7500 with the cool radio frequency remote control. Now I have no blue dots but I have only one capture setting that works and that is avi which makes huge file sizes (also the quality is ok but not great).

Thanks for the link