6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
Great for TV, forget about taping shows
Date of Review: Mar 17, 2002
The Bottom Line: The basic TV viewing functionality of this tuner card is excellent; the other features it advertises are nearly worthless due to poor software.
Features of this TV card abound. It includes most of the features of the more expensive ATI-TV Wonder, including digital VCR with scheduled viewing, multi-channel preview, and some closed captioning features. I found that most of these were overshadowed by poor software implementation. VCR recording was at such poor resolution that it was nearly worthless; multi-channel preview is a still snapshot of a block of channels, and at low resolution; and the close-captioning is a neat idea, but of little use to most users.
Installation was easy. It means plugging an audio output cable into your soundcard, either internally through a special cable or externally into the soundcard's line-in jack. Unlike most users, I had no problems with the driver software. I experienced a minor IRQ conflict with a legacy modem, but that was an issue with my PC's assignment of IRQs and not the TV card.
Overall the TV card does work as advertised, despite the shortcomings of the software. Picture quality is excellent, and puts almost no load on the CPU in fullscreen mode (even on my PII-450). Channel navigation is straightforward, and the basic TV features are logically laid out. If you're looking to watch TV on your PC and it's worth $50 to you, this hardware meets your needs.
