Boob Tube

    TV capture cards are one of those odd little things. You don't know why anyone would ever need one, but then you get one and you find all kinds of uses for it and pretty soon you can't live without it.
    ATI makes all kinds of TV and video capture cards. The ATI TV Wonder VE (Value Edition) is the cheapest. Here's the skinny:
    The TV Wonder VE is a PCI expansion card. It has a cable TV tuner (125 chanel capacity) and a stack of video decoding and processing hardware onboard. The principle behind the thing, as with all of ATI's TV cards, is the card itself handles the bulk of the processing, decoding, deinterlacing, and so on so your system's main processor doesn't have to deal with the strain. The system works and it works well.
    With the VE you can essentially do three things: Watch TV on your PC (a function of dubious merit, really), record TV onto your PC (much more fun) and capture analog video from a multitude of sources on your PC (camcorders, game consoles, VCR's, and so on; arguably the most fun). The VE is a stripped down version of ATI's venerable TV Wonder. It only supports mono audio recording from the TV and it only sports a coax (cable) input and a composite input. No S-Video, no extra TV output, and no extra features for you.
    For what it is the VE's not a bad board. The only thing that really lets it down is the packaged software.
    I have an "old" ATI All-in-Wonder in one of my machines. Let me break the hard news to you - The old software bundle is better. Hear that, ATI? Quit screwing around over there. The packaged software suite - ATI TV, ATI VCR, ATI Movie Player, and ATI Launcher - commits three Sins of Software Design. It has a dopey (and slow) custom interface, the installation installs launch-on-startup junk that you don't need by default, and the interface omits important details.
    The ATI TV application is straightforward and effective enough. It plays back one channel of quality mind rotting television, either in a window or full screen, on your PC at full speed. You get mono sound, you get some color tone and some brightness and contrast controls, and you get closed captioning. That's about it. No multichannel support (you can view periodically updated stills from up to 16 channels, but the tuner can only handle one channel at a time when it comes to video), no stereo sound, no SAP, no nothin'. If you want to watch TV this is just peachy. If you want twiddly bits... Well, buy a higher level card.
    The ATI VCR application is useful in theory but the actual mechanics let it down. You can record whatever input is coming in through the coax or composite connectors at full speed (up to 60 frames a second) in a modest variety of compressed MPEG formats. You can also record to uncompressed AVI files, but the implementation of this is nowhere near as good as the older ATI packages. With my old All-in-Wonder I record to a slightly compressed and quite palatable ATI YUV format. The YUV format doesn't create any noticeable compression artefacts and produces files that are only slightly on the gigantic side - Half an hour of solid TV at full resoltion and 30 frames a second is 900 megs. The newer VCR package that ships with the VE records to straight uncompressed (DIB) format only. Half an hour of video at the same settings is somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen gigabytes. Yow.
    Unfortunately, the ATI VCR is too stupid to recogize third party codecs. You get the built in choice of (shoddy) compressed MPEGS, and you get uncompressed AVI. That's it. You can't record straight to DivX or Inedo or Radius or whatever you like. You can't even install the old YUV codec and use that. This really puts the crimp on your TV archiving unless you have a massive hard drive.
    Also bundled is the ATI Video Player, which functions exactly like Windows Media Player (and, thankfully, supports third party codecs) but takes longer to load and crashes more. You can't ignore it, though, because it automatically steals all of your multimedia file associations. If you want to go back to your old media player you need to reset all your associations manually. Joy.
    The kicker is you can get the full featured AT TV Wonder non-VE edition for about the same price if you shop around. This really puts the nail in the VE's coffin unless the full featured card isn't available in your area. Failing that the VE isn't a bad card, it's just that there's a better card (made by the same company, no less) that costs you a scant three or four dollars more. If it weren't for the horrible software bundle the VE would be a better deal. As it stands, you may as well go for the full featured card and be done with it.
    Recommended, but on the technical level only.