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Installation
Installation is as easy as it sounds, not much to say there. Simply remove the panel and insert the card into the PCI Slot. At the rear of the card you have a composite RCA jack, a 1/8 audio jack and the coaxial connector for your cable. In order to watch TV just plug your cable into the coaxial jack and if you wish to watch/record video(or camcorder) insert the RCA cable into the composite plug. As for the sound, take the output of the 1/8 jack of the TV Tuner card and plug it into the 1/8 jack line of your sound card. That's pretty much it. The wire required for installation is included with the bundle.
Software setup is a snap as well, just insert your ATI Wonder CD and click the install button. That will install the driver and multimedia center including the optional components as selected. To activate the remote, click "Remote Button" on the driver disk installation menu. In the maintenance section there is a display adapter information section, a problem reported section and a driver update (useful) button. It's not really a large bundle but may well prove to be useful to a novice user. Now you'll just need to configure some regional settings such as country and area code. A very nice feature is the ability to update the TV guide listings software, which we will get to in a bit. You'll control it through the sound properties menu of your sound card (especially line in).
Time for the good part, we'll start off with the most important thing, quality!! As ATI launches new products, the quality continues to get better and better. As for this TV tuner card in comparison with the TV wonder USB edition, we can see a slight improvement. Since you'll be using a monitor don't expect a crystal clear image in full screen mode, but it'll still turn out pretty good. In windows mode the quality is perfect, which even surprised me! You can constantly work with the application and it won't lag, only when you have an application minimized and you maximize it that you're going to see interference in your TV windows screen.
When it comes to sound, I'm more than a little disappointed. Here are a few reasons why. What's the use in having a TV tuner card in your computer with a nice sound system when all you have to use is mono sound? Hello, we're not in the 70's anymore! Which one will it be, the TV wonder VE or TV wonder ?
The TV wonder has stereo sound which I would have been willing to pay a few extra bucks for. A bit of a let down, mono is like a black and white TV. Although I expected a negative aspect to this product I would never have guessed it to be this. Second let down is the interference like lagging you get when you adjust the volume on the remote control. If you plan on recording be sure to set the volume "before" and not to touch it while it records. The third setback I found was the noise that you hear anytime you flip through the channels. Despite all of this there are a lot of upsides that will help downplay the setbacks.
The digital VCR and scheduled viewing are very useful. As the name implies, it lets you record everything on the TV channel or caption from and external source or tuner source. It records right onto your hard drive as well as giving you many options to choose from. The options for the recording are really quite good. You can choose your compression method and the size of the windows for recording and create custom settings so you may record a movie without using all your hard drive space within an hour. The predefined quality setting sare :
- DVD quality type MPEG 1 : video 352X240, NTSC 8 MB/s, audio 48000 KHZ, 15 Gigs : 4 hours and 26 minutes
- Good Type MPEG 2 : video 6240X240, NTSC 6 MB/s, audio 44100 KHZ, 15 Gigs : 5 hours and 53 minutes
- Longer TYPE MPEG 2 : video 640X240, NTSC 2.00 MB/s, audio 44100 KHZ, 15 gig : 17 hours and 7 minutes
- Video CD type MPEG 1 : video 352X240, NTSC 1.13 MB/s, audio 44100 KHZ, 15 Gigs : 1 day and 5 hours
Custom was quite handy, simply adjust the settings and save them once you've got them right. I was able to record a two hour film of decent quality and sound to under 700 MB. After a while of tinkering, I got the settings right, saved them, and was finally free of headaches.
Next Page - Software and Final Words
Previous Page - Introduction
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ATI TV Wonder VE Remote Control Edition: ATI has always impressed us with their home entertainment based products. Today we'll see if they continue doing so.
