Good card, bad support

The ATI TV Wonder VE is a great card it just has one problem, and that really isn’t even with the card itself. The drivers and video software that comes with the card has major bugs. The major problem that I have had is in Windows XP (I’m not sure if it does this in other OS’s since I don’t have any to test it on). After installing the card, into the box, it was time to install the software. Once I got the software installed, I opened up ATI’s TV player and all I got was a scrambled picture. I checked everything and searched the web until I could find something. It turns out that the only way to get the picture to show up is to switch the color depth while the TV player is running. This is the only other fix I was able to find aside from using a third party TV player. Aside from this the card works great. The TV Guide program that comes with the software bundle is very useful and there are no problems with it.

The quality and features of this card are great. Picture quality, in my opinion, surpasses that of a regular TV, and I now use my computer as my main source for watching TV in my bedroom. If you want to watch TV while you have a web browser open, the software puts a little TV icon in your menu bar of the browser and if you hit it then it opens the TV in a little pane on the left side and it scrolls a TV guide. Another nice feature is the composite input. This comes in handy if you want to digitally rerecord your VHS’s or you can use it to hook up a gaming system.