Well, after much fiddling I finally broke down and bought MCE 2005.
I would love to say that this card just kicks butt and you should totally get it. But for MMC alone ATi should suffer some serious wrath.
Heres a quick rundown of my experience so-far with the HDTV Wonder- Remote Edition.
1) Packaging.
Not bad, the box is huge but the contents are no so big. Nothing bad though.
2) The Card.
PCB layout looks clean, the size is good, no problems here.
If you don't plan on actually putting this card in your PC its GREAT!
3) Drivers.
If you want proof that ATi still hasn't gotten its act together where drivers are concerned look no further than this product.
The drivers themself are finicky at best, proper installation either entails a magical series of events largely made up out of luck and or a pact with satan.
The drivers for the remot are utter crap. With a "working" install the remote control will launch the DTV or TV apps, it will launch the MMC app, and it will adjust volume. If the DTV window is not highlighted it will function as a mouse.
What this means is it will neither skip forward, nor back, nor pause, nor stop, nor record nor change channels, nor let you change to a channel using the numbered buttons, nor display the info, nor schedule nor just about nearly anything else you would actually WANT to do with a remote control other than volume up/down/mute.
Assuming you get the drivers to be nice (the newest version is admittedly better than the previous but not by much) you move on to the REAL fun!
4) Software.
MMC is....for lack of anything more descriptive, a complete, utter, flaming, disappointing, sick joke.
The DTV "app" will be the focus since this is the HDTV Wonder and as such its pretty integral to the cards function.
I found the autoscan to work well if not slowly, but this is where the adulation stops.
Once playing the player would insist on every so often (usually within a few minutes of each other) insist on blinking grey and telling me what format was being played back.
Very nice.
The audio lag was NOTICEABLE. To the point where I just cannot watch it its up to almost a second off the video. For the record I have it downmixed for 2 speakers, neither stereo nor surround compat. mode made any diff. I can't tell you if passthrough is any better because I don't have a reciever capable of decoding the signal hooked up to this thing.
The video playback isnt much better. If there is a way to disable timeshifting then its not very intuitively placed, and considering how poorly MMC handles it thats a shame.
Hitting pause and walking away for 10 minutes I came back to find that at certain points the video just skipped over a second or two. The video gets very choppy, the grey "flash" still shows up but the information box doesnt (for the record the signal stayed strong during these flashes and never dipped below 75%, most the time it was at full bars reception).
Even without time shifting I'm sitting here right now with the news playing and loading a webpage, even though CPU utilizating stays sub 5-%, makes it stutter, and now its to the point where it stutters constantly. Literally wont even play solid for a full second without skipping. everything but firefox is closed, cpu util. less than 30%, GOBS of memory free.
I am REALLY hoping that installing MCE 2005 fixes all these problems as so far everything I have described could EASILY be contributed to ATi's crap software.
Long story not so short....this is hands down the WORST software I've used in a LONG time.
I tried using Media Portal, which specifically states it supports this card. 3 hours of fiddling, diving for pearls in their lovely wiki manual and searching the forums I discovered that they don't support ATSC, which....the HDTV Wonder is an ATSC tuner so I cannot really understand how they warped the word enough to cover this. The best anyone in their forum could do was video from one channel, a spanish channel, and couldn't change the channel....
Yay open source.
Anyway, if anyone has had any of these problems and knows which lamp you rub to get it to work right, feel free to post. Otherwise, PLEASE, only consider this card if you are going to use XP MCE (and even this is unconfirmed but everything I hear is good).
I would love to say that this card just kicks butt and you should totally get it. But for MMC alone ATi should suffer some serious wrath.
Heres a quick rundown of my experience so-far with the HDTV Wonder- Remote Edition.
1) Packaging.
Not bad, the box is huge but the contents are no so big. Nothing bad though.
2) The Card.
PCB layout looks clean, the size is good, no problems here.
If you don't plan on actually putting this card in your PC its GREAT!
3) Drivers.
If you want proof that ATi still hasn't gotten its act together where drivers are concerned look no further than this product.
The drivers themself are finicky at best, proper installation either entails a magical series of events largely made up out of luck and or a pact with satan.
The drivers for the remot are utter crap. With a "working" install the remote control will launch the DTV or TV apps, it will launch the MMC app, and it will adjust volume. If the DTV window is not highlighted it will function as a mouse.
What this means is it will neither skip forward, nor back, nor pause, nor stop, nor record nor change channels, nor let you change to a channel using the numbered buttons, nor display the info, nor schedule nor just about nearly anything else you would actually WANT to do with a remote control other than volume up/down/mute.
Assuming you get the drivers to be nice (the newest version is admittedly better than the previous but not by much) you move on to the REAL fun!
4) Software.
MMC is....for lack of anything more descriptive, a complete, utter, flaming, disappointing, sick joke.
The DTV "app" will be the focus since this is the HDTV Wonder and as such its pretty integral to the cards function.
I found the autoscan to work well if not slowly, but this is where the adulation stops.
Once playing the player would insist on every so often (usually within a few minutes of each other) insist on blinking grey and telling me what format was being played back.
Very nice.
The audio lag was NOTICEABLE. To the point where I just cannot watch it its up to almost a second off the video. For the record I have it downmixed for 2 speakers, neither stereo nor surround compat. mode made any diff. I can't tell you if passthrough is any better because I don't have a reciever capable of decoding the signal hooked up to this thing.
The video playback isnt much better. If there is a way to disable timeshifting then its not very intuitively placed, and considering how poorly MMC handles it thats a shame.
Hitting pause and walking away for 10 minutes I came back to find that at certain points the video just skipped over a second or two. The video gets very choppy, the grey "flash" still shows up but the information box doesnt (for the record the signal stayed strong during these flashes and never dipped below 75%, most the time it was at full bars reception).
Even without time shifting I'm sitting here right now with the news playing and loading a webpage, even though CPU utilizating stays sub 5-%, makes it stutter, and now its to the point where it stutters constantly. Literally wont even play solid for a full second without skipping. everything but firefox is closed, cpu util. less than 30%, GOBS of memory free.
I am REALLY hoping that installing MCE 2005 fixes all these problems as so far everything I have described could EASILY be contributed to ATi's crap software.
Long story not so short....this is hands down the WORST software I've used in a LONG time.
I tried using Media Portal, which specifically states it supports this card. 3 hours of fiddling, diving for pearls in their lovely wiki manual and searching the forums I discovered that they don't support ATSC, which....the HDTV Wonder is an ATSC tuner so I cannot really understand how they warped the word enough to cover this. The best anyone in their forum could do was video from one channel, a spanish channel, and couldn't change the channel....
Yay open source.
Anyway, if anyone has had any of these problems and knows which lamp you rub to get it to work right, feel free to post. Otherwise, PLEASE, only consider this card if you are going to use XP MCE (and even this is unconfirmed but everything I hear is good).
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