ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 9000 PRO, (64 MB) AGP Video Card

The All-In-Wonder cards are variants of ATI's standard graphics cards. They add an extra bundle of TV/Video features to the standard model. The All-In-Wonder bundle is basically the same across the model line, although it has changed a little over time. Most of the comments in this review would apply to all of the recent-generation All-In-Wonder models. The All-In-Wonder package adds about $75 to the cost of the basic ATI graphics card, and is available in several current models. If you are buying a new graphics card and you are looking for a terrific bundle of TV and video features at a modest price, look no further. If you aren't, you might want to spend that extra $75 on higher-performance 3D for gaming.

I do have to mention one big caveat up front in an otherwise-positive review: while the hardware is impressive, ATI's software is notoriously buggy and unreliable, and that hasn't changed much over the years that I've been using ATI graphics cards. If you can't put up with malfunctioning drivers, crashing media software, unresponsive technical support, and sketchy documentation, then you may find ATI's products to be more trouble than they're worth. I have to admit that I've become increasingly disappointed with the software the longer I use the AIW product - there's a lot of promise, but that's not much good if the software keeps failing more often than it works successfully. By now I'm at the point where I seriously wonder if I would buy another ATI product - it's just too frustrating.

The 64-Mbyte 9000 Pro model I have was at the high end of 3D graphics performance a couple of years ago, but it would now be considered at the low end. It will do for playing older 3D games with adequate performance, but it is not up to the demands of the very latest games in 2004. For example it's fine with Unreal Tournament 2004, but it's not up to running Doom 3. However, that makes it a great buy if you are primarily interested in the All-In-Wonder video features, and it doesn't need a separate power-supply connector or a huge cooling fan. It contains everything you need to make your PC into a Tivo-like Personal Video Recorder.

Look at this array of inputs and outputs:

Input:
- Composite video
- S-Video
- RF TV
- Stereo audio

(no Firewire for DV though)

Output:
- Analog or digital VGA
- Composite video
- S-Video
- Stereo audio (internal and external)
- Digital audio (coax)

And software:

- ATI Multimedia Center (MMC), with TV, Video, and DVD player
- Driver which supports dual-head display (VGA and TV at the same time)
- Video digitizer with real-time MPEG-2 compression capability
- GuidePlus TV scheduling software
- Pinnacle Studio video editing software

It also includes the Remote Wonder, a full-featured RF remote control unit with a receiver that plugs into any USB port.

Of course with that many connections, there's no room for them all on the back panel, so ATI provides a couple of break-out cables sporting several connectors. The video input connector has a nice little box that you can attach to something with a sticky pad if you want to mount it permanently. The VGA monitor connector is digital, with an adapter to convert it to analog - which works fine, but sticks out a bit far from the back of the computer if you're close to a wall. The package even includes composite video, S-Video and audio cables.

The AIW has a built-in TV tuner, so you can plug in a TV cable directly or antenna and tune to any channel. The tuner supports stereo sound and text captioning. Or you can plug in a composite video (+ stereo audio) or S-Video signal source. The MMC TV display software can display the video signal in a window, or show it as a semi-transparent overlay on the desktop. You can use the included GuidePlus software to select TV programs on a schedule which is updated from the internet, or just choose the channel manually. You can even scan the text captions automatically on all selected channels looking for specific keywords. The card doesn't do FM radio though, as some other TV cards do.

Note that you will get the best use out of this if you can connect a TV cable with non-digital and non-scrambled channels directly to the AIW TV input. If you use digital satellite or cable, then the AIW's TV tuner won't help you. You can still use the S-Video or composite video input, of course.

Digitizing is as easy as clicking on the Record button in the TV display software. You can select any input that has a video source connected. You can schedule multiple recordings to start and end at any time using the ATI Scheduler, or GuidePlus can do it for you when you select programs to record. You can even do real-time pause, review, and catch-up with a live TV program or video stream. You can record directly in MPEG-2 compression format (with user-selected settings), AVI format (with your choice of codec), or ATI's streamlined VCR format (an MPEG variant). The built-in codecs for the MPEG-2 and VCR formats are fast enough to record at full resolution (e.g. 720 x 480 x 30fps) in real time with a reasonably fast CPU, but you're on your own with the various user-installed AVI codecs. Don't expect to do real-time DivX compression. ATI's VCR format is the fastest, but unfortunately it's readable only by ATI's own media player, so I always use MPEG-2.

How good is the video signal and the recording quality? The signal is best with S-video. Composite and TV quality is ok, but doesn't look quite as good to me as it does on a good TV monitor - the picture seems a little bit fuzzier and a bit compressed in tonal range. No complaints about the digitizing performance though, at least with a 2.5 GHz system running WinXP. The digitized video looks as good as the original, and the frame rate is smooth, with no skipped frames or audio sync problems (your mileage may vary!). You might not want to run any other software at the same time, since the compression is all done by software and needs most of the CPU to keep up in real time.

The video output to TV works very well, although it can take a bit of fiddling with the settings to get it working right. The AIW is able to output the same display to the VGA and the TV at the same time with different scan rates, a major improvement over earlier-generation TV support. Of course a 1024 x 768 computer display is going to look a bit fuzzy on a normal 60Hz interlaced TV monitor, but you can do it without changing the refresh rate or resolution on the computer VGA monitor. You may also find when you first try it that the TV monitor displays the normal desktop, but not video - video windows remain blank on the TV display. That's because video drivers using DirectX write directly to the graphic card memory, bypassing the higher level software that replicates the display contents to the TV monitor. Fortunately the ATI hardware has a display-copy mode which fixes this, replicating the video from the VGA monitor to the TV monitor. Surprisingly it isn't the default setting - you have to find it in a somewhat obscure menu and turn it on. You can set it to keep the video in a window, or make it go automatically to full-screen on the TV when you start video playback.

The Remote Wonder is an interesting toy, but its 400 MHz RF transmission power is too limited. Once you get beyond 20-30 feet, or put a few walls in the way, reception becomes erratic. You can improve the range a little by extending the very short antenna wire. More recent AIW models now offer the Remote Wonder 2 "with improved range". The Remote Wonder comes with its own setup software, and can be programmed to use with any application, not just ATI's MMC software. The default functions often work for the basics like Play/Stop/Volume without any special programming in common player applications.

The Pinnacle Studio 8 software included is a limited "special ATI edition" which has the annoying habit of offering advanced features only to tell you that you must upgrade to use them when you click on them. In spite of that, it's a decent video editor, and the casual user won't miss the advanced features not included. It's able to do simple DVD authoring as well as video editing in MPEG or AVI formats. It won't read the ATI software's special VCR recording format though.

The DVD player in ATI's MMC software seems to be a variant of Cyberlink's PowerDVD software, licensed under an arrangement that requires you to insert your original CD before you can download any upgrades from ATI on the web. It enforces all the standard DVD playback restrictions, including applying Macrovision scrambling to the TV output if the DVD requires it. Supposedly it can get a hardware decoding assist from the Radeon graphics card, but if so it doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference to performance. It plays smoothly in spite of that.

If you want hear the sound from the AIW (e.g. the TV sound or the stereo audio inputs) through your PC speakers, you must connect it to your computer sound card. You can either connect the AIW's external analog audio output back into the external line input of your sound card, or connect it internally the the Aux or CD input of the sound card (better). The DVD software can output a Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS signal from the DVD to the AIW card's digital audio output connector, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be able to send it to your PC sound card's digital output instead (something Nero's Showtime DVD player manages to do correctly). That means you would either have to switch your external digital audio decoder to plug into the AIW instead of the PC's digital audio output if you want digital sound when playing a DVD, or else find a way to route it through by plugging the AIW's digital sound output into the PC's digital sound input (if it has one).

Now, a final word about ATI's support. First the positive: ATI provides frequent software updates on their web site. And you have the advantage of using one of the two most common 3D graphics card families, so most graphics software has been tested with an ATI Radeon card. But there are so many ATI Radeon graphics cards with so many variations, and they change so frequently, that users often complain that it's like playing driver-of-the-month. Every month there's a flood of new bug reports with various graphics software, and the temporary solution is to upgrade to the latest Radeon driver and hope it doesn't break anything. With the AIW you have to upgrade several different software components in synchronization, and you must follow a complex process of uninstalling and re-installing in the correct order, or chaos will result. Most of the upgrades adding bulk and complexity to the driver software probably have nothing to do with your graphics card, but are part of the ever-growing Radeon set. The quality and responsiveness of ATI's technical support is frankly terrible, although it's probably no worse than other suppliers of complex hardware. User support forums are your best bet to resolve any problems. The user interface of the graphics card driver is quite complicated, and not well explained in the thin manuals, especially when it gets into the more obscure video settings and the combination of TV and VGA monitors. And as for the reliability of the MMC software - well, I've said my piece at the start of this review.

At least with the AIW cards you are getting the boxed retail product, not an OEM model with an ATI Radeon chip. The OEM Radeon models generally work just fine, but there are pitfalls when you look for software upgrades and support from ATI.

So what can you do with all this? Lots! At least, when it actually works...

1. Plug in any video source, such as a TV, VCR, digital tuner, video camera, show the video on your desktop
2. Digitize video smoothly to a compressed MPEG-2 file, either on demand or scheduled via an event timer
3. Find programs and scan TV channels using GuidePlus software
4. Display video output from your computer on a TV, optionally at the same time as you use the computer display for something else.
5. Play DVDs from a DVD drive on the PC
6. Control the computer remotely from across the room or the next room using the Remote Wonder control

In other words, it lets your PC do pretty much everything that a Tivo-type video recorder does, albeit less reliably, and it's loads of fun to play with everything.

If you use your computer for TV/video work, or you just like to experiment, I give it a qualified recommendation. It would be a lot higher if ATI paid more attention to software testing and reliability issues.