8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Cheap way to convert your old VHS tapes
Date of Review: Jan 24, 2002
The Bottom Line: good for basic video capture/TV for those wanting stereo input/output should opt for ATI's TV Wonder and not the VE
I purchased ATI's TV-Wonder VE at Best Buy for $39 ($49-$10 rebate)
Installation was a little tricky,Windows XP installed it's own driver for the TV Wonder and I had to manually remove it to get the card to work right
My main reason for buying this card is to convert my old VHS tapes to MPEG-1 and burn them to Video CD (playable on most home DVD players)the card does a pretty good job at video capture with 0% - 1% dropped frames, although this is with no other activity on my machine, I once opened a word document while I was capturing and my dropped frames jumped from 1% to 8%.
so don't plan on doing any work on the PC while capturing
as the encoding process is fairly CPU intensive.
The TV Wonder VE ships with ATI Multimedia Center v. 7.1
and Guide Plus, a plugin which downloads local TV listings
and a IE plugin which allows you to watch TV while browsing the web.
Guide Plus also allows you to record a program by clicking on it's listing.picture quality is nice although the audio is mono.
Overall, not a bad card,you get decent video capture and tv for not alot of green.
