Enables Excellent Capture from Camcorder

With the advantage of having read the earlier reviews, I am restricting my comments to topics not covered or covered inadequately. In general, I found the TV Wonder VE card to be quite functional and capable of high-quality TV playback and video capture with the right software. I have a Celeron 1.2GB with 512MB of RAM and a Voodoo3 2000 16MB PCI card (I also used the card with the same motherboard in its original configuration of a Celeron 800 and a Savage4 32MB AGP card and noted no significant difference in the performance of the TV Wonder card). Installing the card in Windows ME was somewhat problematic and I had to reboot the computer twice before all the required drivers for the TV Wonder were properly installed. Part of that was my fault-I shut down my antivirus software to install the ATI software, but hadn't turned off the Autoprotect feature of the antivirus software so it activated upon reboot and I believe it conflicted with the configuration update that the ATI software was making to Windows ME.

After installation, I tinkered with the TV feature of the card and found that connecting the cable cord to the round input on the card enabled me to use the automatic tuning feature and find all the channels. However, I also discovered that I got a clearer picture if I ran the cable to my basic VHS VCR and then ran a composite video cable from my VCR to the composite input on the ATI card (which also meant running an audio cable from my VCR to the line input on my sound card). The MPEG-2 capture resolution settings in the ATI MMC software work reasonably well if you simply plan to record a TV program for later playback on your computer.

If you plan to capture home videos using this card and you want to do so with the highest quality result possible, then you will NOT want to use the ATI MMC software for the capture. For some inexplicable reason, the ATI software fails to take full advantage of the card's capabilities. The TV Wonder VE, like most inexpensive TV cards on the market today, uses the Conexant Brooktree chipset to perform video capture and the Conexant driver to access the chipset. Using the proper software with this chipset and driver, you can capture a full 480 lines of vertical resolution from any video source. Yet the ATI MMC does not permit you to capture more than 240 lines of vertical resolution. WHY??? I have no clue. The good news is that there is freeware readily available which permits high resolution capture from the TV Wonder VE card. Virtual VCR and ATV2000 (the latter also requires installation of a modified driver for the Brooktree chipset in the TV Wonder VE card) are both freeware and I have used both to capture into avi format at 640x480 resolution and then use the freeware TMPGenc to convert the avi into an mpg meeting SVCD standards and Nero to burn the mpg onto an SVCD which I then can play on my Apex DVD with DVD-like quality. (Caution-not all DVD players can read and play SVCDs; since the SVCD format originated in China, I believe that any DVD player made in China supports the format, but I'm not positve about this.) I have compared SVCDs burned using the limited resolution available using ATI MMC with those using 640x480 resolution and for my eyes the latter are clearly superior in quality. The additional lines of vertical resolution simply provide greater sharpness of detail and eliminate the blurry, out-of-focus picture I see emanating from the ATI MMC software with its paltry 240 lines of vertical resolution.