AIW Radeon vs ATi TV Wonder VE vs WinTV vs the pinnacle one......

[chutamango]

Ok.....im looking to get myself a TV tuner but quality is rather important for me. Id like the full screen video to be rather crisp....but I also dont want to pay alot of money (ya ya...best of both worlds...). I was wondering if any of you have tried these cards (AIW Radeon, ATi TV Wonder VE, WinTV, the pinnacle one......)or even compared em to see which might be the best buy. My video card is a Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 TNT2 Ultra so thats why im not really sure I want to get the AIW Radeon. Well...if anyone can help id be much obliged. Thanks.

chuta

system is going to be
1 gig tbird
KT7A-Raid MB
256 pc150 tinyBGA ram
MAxi Gamer Xentor 32
and some other stuff.....

 

[gdog3000]

i am in the same situation, just want a good quality tv tuner card, but already have 32 mb geforce 2 gts

 

[Turbopit]

OK, another me-too post. I am looking for something like the all-in-wonder.

 

[Zebu]

well i have the pinnacle one (Pinnacle Studio PCTV RAVE) its a mono version but the pro version is stereo. it does ok and im pretty happy with the image quality (not as good as a real tv but pretty good if you can get a good signal into it)

HOWEVER

these bad points have shown themselves.

1. on my voodoo 3 with anything but the drivers that came on the video card cd there is a purple line 2 pixels wide that runs down the right hand side when viewing in full screen overlay mode, the purple is of course the overlay colour. but im pretty sure this is 3dfx's fault

2. the image displayed on the screen is more than you would normally see on the tv. as the tv projects a slightly larger picture than we see and the edge of the picture is covered by the black border around the screen. my card shows you what you do not see in those places, it can be the top of a set or just a black line, but it never looks quite right.

appart from those things its a nice card. I fix both of them by just streching the horizontal and vertical size on my monitor enough that they are no longer visable when im watching in full screen, and change it back when im going back to windows.

be warned the card takes up 2 irq's

 

[Rendus]

I have a Hauppauge WinTV Stereo, and love it. So far it's the best TV tuner (and best supported across multiple OSes) I own. (PBTV3, PBTV5, WinTV Stereo, ATI All-In-Wonder original).

BeOS 5 Personal supports it out of box. There is pretty good support for it under Linux. Works fine in WinME even.

 

[MiniMaul]

Just got back from seeing an AIW Radeon in action on a Win2K machine. Plays full screen while in TV mode. Pretty awesome. Really shows the limitations of the NTSC system's resolution and color. Can't speak for 3d/games. Records mpeg2 on the fly(hardware encoding) at 720x480 with no problems. The Online "TV Guide" stuff worked great over a cable modem. I'm hooked...gotta have one. This was on a KT7 raid MB with a 700 Duron.

 

[junthin]

A bump since I am wondering the same thing. I have a thread I started as well before I found this one. But no one is replying... Someone reply with some opinion from experience. Thanks!

 

[patriarch]

I have an AIW Radeon. It produces very good video quality, better than I thought possible with NTSC. DVD, with it's better video source, is simply amazing. This guy will really make you critical of the output given you over the cable.

Problems?

The video is noisier than the input, and more susceptible to interference. I suspect that this is because the much lower bandwidth of the TV set filters most of it out, sort of like using a dishrag filter on your Nikon. Then too, my face is about 15 inches awway from a high-end 17" monitor running 1024 X 768.

I am adjusting contrast much more often on my AIW as I change channels. I suspect normal TV has some automatic compensation to the carelessly set output from the networks. The changes occur between channels, and during commercial breaks. They are really present in the input.


Driver support is spotty. The 3063 (older) drivers work well, the next 5 attempts do not, at least on my machine.

I purchased this to be able to do some light-duty video editing on my computer. It looks like this shold work.

SYSTEM

Win 98 SE
Tbird 900
Abit KT7 Raid
2 X 128K Crucial PC133 CAS2 memory
AIW Radeon
Aureal SQ2500 Sound
2X WD 45 gig 5400 rpm in RAID 0
Creative Encore DVD
S&F Speedwriter R/W
+ some other junk, no network.

 

[DallasTejas]

I have a Radeon 64 DDR and wanted to stay within the same product family, so I bought an ATI TV-Wonder. Overall, I'm pleased with it. The TV-Wonder has a max resolution of 640x480. Since my desktop is at 1280x1040, the display can get a bit grainy at full screen on my 19" monitor, but looks fine if you are further away. I generally keep it in a window in the upper right corner. It does look better than the TV on my old Voodoo3 3500.

My only beef with the ATI tuner is the fact that the Multimedia Center on the tuner (version 6) is not compatible with the Radeon (version 7). ATI claims that a fix is in the works (when? - Who knows). You have to uninstall the Version 7 Multimedia Center before installing the tuner software. The TV functionality works great, but......

If you want to watch DVDs, you have to install the DVD player off Version 7. You can install the DVD player only, but the software still installs a portion of version 7. When this happens, the TV tuner works fine until you want to change your TV setup. If you click on the setup icon, the tuner aborts but the sound continues until you reboot. Right now, I like the way I have my tuner setup so it's not a huge issue. Still, it is far less than perfect.

I guess I could load a third party DVD player, but that would cost more money. Hopefully a unified Multimedia Center is on the near horizon.

 

[santi]

I own a Pinnacle PCTV Studio PCI tunner, and it works... just works.
The software bundled with it is really poor in functionalities, for example, you can't hide the mouse cursor while watching full screen, you can't see a display of which channel you´re looking at, you can't export the channel list so everytime you have to reinstall the software you have to configure every channel again, the image moves a bit every few seconds, there are no WDM drivers for it..... and I could keep on telling you defects... but what´s worse is that at pinnacle.com they give you 0 support (that's zero support).... there are a lot of people begging for WDM drivers, and new software features, and the people at pinnacle does nothing.. I think they don´t even read their own forum because they don´t answer.... it´s really dissapointing....

I've heard this is a relly good piece of hardware but you can use it only with the software provided with it, which as I said above, is really bad. As Pinnacle doesn't provide WDM drivers, you can't even use a third party software, and at Pinnacle they don't even support you if you are trying to develop some apps for it....

really, I've never seen such a bad support.
I don't understand why they don´'t implement WDM drivers and give just a little support to their own customers....
:disgust: