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Reviews for ATI TV WONDER PRO REMOTE CONTROL EDITION TV Tuner CardPCI - NTSC - MPN: 100703147 
By member:
bgfan
- Mar 23, 2005
ATI TV WONDER PRO REMOTE CONTROL EDITION TV Tuner...Strengths: Reasonable price. Decent live video and recording quality. Convenient remote control. Weakness: CPU intensive. Included software suite is buggy and with limited features. This product is satisfactory as an occasional TV and personal video recorder on a spare computer. The picture quality is very good. Using the highest resolution recording mode, the DVD video looks fine even on my 50 inch TV. The remote control works just fine. 100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful? Top
By member:
SquirrelWorks
- Nov 9, 2004
ATI TV WONDER PRO REMOTE CONTROL EDITION TV Tuner...Strengths: Excellent “live” video quality, very good recording quality, audio/video break-out box, remote control. Weakness: Compatibility issues w/ P4 HyperThreading, random picture freezes, mediocre and bloated application design, software mpeg encoder. This seems to be a recurring problem w/ ATI hardware, lots of potential, but always dragged down to mediocrity by poor drivers, compatibility issues, and uninspired applications. ATI is well aware of incompatibility issues w/ this card and Pentium 4 Hyperthreading, yet does nothing to warn customers. With HT enabled, the card will hang within minutes of use. Microsoft has provided a hotfix for XP and SP1, while SP2 has incorporated the fix directly. Despite the fix, the video still freezes randomly, albeit less often, which makes recordings unreliable (sound will still play, but video is frozen, only a close of the application and restart gets things back to normal). In its current state, this card won’t be replacing your Tivo anytime soon! The application suite is terribly bloated, you don’t need 90% of the stuff this card installs by default. All you really need is the recording application, but unless you intervene, the installer will install a DVD player, CD player, library management app, toolbars, and on and on. ATI seems unaware that nearly all these functions are available under Windows Media Player. And it’s not as if the ATI applications are great alternatives, most seem incomplete and amateurish, as if written by someone with only modest programming skills. And while the included Guide Plus application is free, it’s less than impressive as well. You can’t browse the guide independently of the video tuner, it insists on playing and changing stations as you browse. And when you schedule a recording, it insists on playing the video, it won’t simply capture the video in the background, hidden from view. In fact, you can’t even minimize the video w/ the ATI applications, minimizing only reverts to a desktop view, very annoying. I know this isn’t a limitation of the ATI hardware since Snapstream’s Beyond TV 3 works correctly w/ this ATI card, it captures the video stream completely hidden from view, you wouldn’t even know video was being recorded except for the indicator in the system tray! And while it’s nice to have included an RF remote control, I find it very awkward to use. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m all thumbs, but I can’t for the life of me control the cursor w/ any accuracy, more trouble than it’s worth. Also, some may prefer IR instead of RF so they can alternatively use a universal remote. Finally, the lack of a hardware encoder is problematic, this card *will* drop frames under heavy CPU loads (the card itself uses ~60% of the CPU processing time of my P4 2.8GHz!). Again, sadly, a potentially very good product dragged down by bad drivers, compatibility issues, and mediocre applications. If you buy this card, plan on additional expense to replace these ATI applications (e.g., Snapstream Beyond TV3, WinDVD Recorder, etc.). 97% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful? Top
By member:
Scottbus
- Nov 14, 2004
ATI TV WONDER PRO REMOTE CONTROL EDITION TV Tuner...Strengths: Low Price Weakness: Will not work with RealTek audio chip, common on NForce 2 based motherboards. This product seems to have issues with RealTek audio chips. This audio chip seems to be very common on NForce 2 chipset mobos, a very popular chipset for AMD processors. I've got 2 Mobo's (Shuttle and Asus) with the Nforce 2 and Realtek chips,it doesn't work with either one. ATI's software, specifically the TV/VCR crashs when faced with RealTek Audio. I bought this card for video capture of old VCR tapes,and TV viewing. 96% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful? Top
By member:
chonkey
- Jan 18, 2005
ATI TV WONDER PRO REMOTE CONTROL EDITION TV Tuner...Strengths: nice accessory for plugging in a dvd player or video game console. it lets me play directly onto my computer while saving space. remote is conveniet. lets u control many different progs like winamp Weakness: terrible compatibility issues. all new intel d915 boards with integrated realtek sound have an issue while trying to do initial setup. it crashes and you can't get around it to jus get it to run. cont- i had to get a friend's sound card to complete that initial setup to just get it working. another problem with their video mode. it has a half a second lag when playing media through the analog which makes playing video games impossible. i had to use a 3rd party prog jus to play them. i use intervideo windvr3 and it seems to work well. another issue is lack of visual clarity. i was disappointed at how unsharp the resolution was through cable. sound is also screwed up and comes out harsh on tv. no sound prob in video mode. it probably has to do with the compatibility issue with realtek. they said they would fix it with the patch released around december but it's still problematic. 67% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful? Top
By member:
shelbywrc
- Apr 1, 2004
ATI TV WONDER PRO REMOTE CONTROL EDITION TV Tuner...Strengths: East to install and use.Remote control for the mouse function is neat and does become useful at times. Weakness: picture quality leaves a little to be desired While most functions are intuitive and easy to program there are some displays that cannot be changed,nor is there any info on what they mean or how to change/program them.I have not use the recording features yet,but they seem simple enough.It could have came with FM also. 50% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful? Top
By member:
pjsweat1
- Aug 24, 2004
ATI TV WONDER PRO REMOTE CONTROL EDITION TV Tuner...Strengths: The software interface makes it easy to use. It's great because it has a build in channel guide. Weakness: I haven't found any yet, the only thing is the tool bar it puts on the side of your desktop, but it is neccessary. I've always trusted the ATi brand for it's quality and attention to detail. The price is right, especially for what you get. It's the perfect device to take up a PCI slot. 43% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful? Top
By member:
kcorr
- Feb 5, 2006
brief moments of despairStrengths: cost $50 at best buy. Weakness: Just to capture video from a camcorder one is required to set up the tv function. This requires a coax cable connection. I got this with a narrow goal in mind...to transfer video from camcorder to hard disk. So I havent any experience good or bad with the rest of the functionality, except that it was hard to "weed through" all of the other functionality to finally find the function that records video. For a good while I had to stay miserable until I downloaded the instruction manual and found out that the capture function exists in the as yet un configured tv function. This meant hooking up cable as if I wanted to watch tv on the pc- which isn't really my goal. So all is well as long as hours of shoveling and brief moments of despair are tolerable. 0% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful? Top
By member:
Wildcard500
- Sep 30, 2006
AIT Wonder Pro cardStrengths: Very good picture, Mpeg-2, cheap Weakness: Software Good points about this card Did you find it helpful or unhelpful? Top 
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ATI TV WONDER PRO REMOTE CONTROL EDITION TV Tuner...
Strengths: Good picture, nice breakout box for easy accessory hookup, RF remote
Weakness: Buggy software, no multi-monitor support, poor tech support, no hardware encoder
I don't normally write reviews of products I have purchased but people need to know the experiences that other people have with the ATI TV Wonder Pro Remote Control edition so they can make an informed decision. I purchased this product after happily using the Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP until my pup ate the remote. I had left ATI after using their ATI TV Wonder VE and being unhappy with their buggy drivers and software and their non-existent tech support. Apparently nothing has changed.
The test system is a custom built system:
MSI K7N2 Delta2 Platinum
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
2GB DDR 400mhz ram
Windowx XP Pro (Clean Install)
Audigy 2 ZS Platinum
PNY GeForce4 4600Ti AGP
eVGA Geforce MX 4000 PCI
After installing the TV tuner I installed all the software as directed. The installation went smoothly and I had the TV tuner up and running. The TV tuner does work well if you want to watch TV in full screen, video desktop, or large display size but don't try to decrease the size if you are using Creative's soundcard software. The picture is scrambled with any size less than the large setting, even inside the ATI guide plus program. Uninstalling the Creative soundcard software, and leaving the drivers installed, fixed the scrambled video signal.
There is no hardware encoder on the card so it will use the CPU heavily when recording.
Another problem with the TV tuner is the lack of multi-monitor support. As more and more users are moving to multi-monitor use you would think ATI would jump on the bandwagon. All most all the other TV tuner makers support multi-monitor use. The ATI TV Wonder crashes the system if you try to put it on a secondary monitor using their MMC software (TV tuner software). Strangely, the TV tuner will work on a secondary monitor if you use 3rd party software.
The remote that comes with the program works with the software from the CD but it stopped working when I updated the software from the ATI website. I may have used the wrong software though.
I have attempted to contact ATI tech support about these issues and received no response. This does not surprise me as these same problems existed when I used the TV Wonder VE.
If all you want is a basic TV setup and don't want to use the TV while trying to multi-task or use multi-monitors the card works fine. Otherwise, you can get a TV tuner from another manufacturer that is more responsive to their customers.
100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?