ATI HDTV Wonder
Written by Brian Bohnert on 10/9/2004 for
PC
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ATI HDTV Wonder
As we move into a more high definition society, there are products that are going to help bridge the gap between the current broadcast signals to the newer high definition signals. Some stations are broadcasting HDTV signals over the airwaves and ATI has a product to help you take advantage of those signals. Today, we’re going to check out the HDTV Wonder from ATI and see if you can get some HDTV programming for cheap. This product will NOT allow you to view HDTV programming off of cable networks as the cable companies encode their signals. With that being said, let’s see what the product comes with to help you retrieve an over the air HDTV signal. The heart and soul of the product is the PCI card with a Philip’s tuner.
The card features a Philips tuner and features the ATI NXT2004 chip, which is capable of 70 DTV channels. It also doubles as an analog tuner so you can use it for regular cable signals as well. On the bracket are two coaxial plugs: one for the DTV antenna and one for an analog cable. The third connection allows you to plug the breaker box that’s included with every other All-in-Wonder product. With the breaker box, you have several inputs available. There is no audio cable for this TV card so you don’t have to have a free audio input in order to receive sound. That’s one nice thing I like about this card that some other TV cards have and it’s one less cable to crowd the rear of the computer.
The original Remote Wonder is included with the package and that will disappoint some of those that like the Remote Wonder II. I really like the original Remote Wonder and I’m a little disappointed that the newer model wasn’t included in the package. Either way, the first Remote Wonder is a solid remote that feels pretty good in the hands.
To help get those pesky HDTV signals, the package comes with a very hefty antenna. It may seem old school to have an antenna but you’ll need something to help receive the signal. As you can see from the picture, the antenna is triangular shaped with fins. To help you with orientating the antenna, you can go to http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/welcome.aspx , which displays the channels you can receive and where you should point the antennae to receive the signals. If the included antenna doesn’t do it for you, you can hook the card up to an external antenna which might help you receive the signals better.
My test setup features an AMD 2400+ XP chip with 512MB of ram and an All-in-Wonder 9600XT card. Windows XP was installed with Service Pack 2 and the latest drivers from ATI’s website were used including Catalyst 4.9 with the new Control Center. The card plugs into any free PCI slot and ATI states that it works with any DirectX 9 video card. I didn’t have a NVIDIA GeForce 6 card to test the HDTV Wonder out with but as you can probably guess, the card worked well with the ATI All-in-Wonder product. You do have to be careful on the order of how you install drivers as I did encounter a few problems with the program not running correctly. This was corrected though after a clearing of all ATI software and a reinstall of them.
I wish I could say my installation went smoothly but even with a clean installation I had some lockups. After my third clean install, it seems to be humming fine. What would happen is that File Library would lock up anytime I would play DTV recordings. I also had a few times the program would lock up while watching DTV. There are still some little quirks here and there that I will discuss later in the review with the MMC program.
A new option in MMC is available when you install it titled DTV. This MMC module lets you view HDTV programming using the HDTV Wonder. After successful installation of the software, I fired up the program and was taken through the familiar wizard setup. The program does an autoscan of the airwaves to find any HDTV signals broadcasting in your area. You’ll be able to see a graphical representation of the signal strength and hear an audio cue when you are in the program’s setup. The GUI for DTV is pretty much the same as the regular TV module.
So after everything was setup, I fired up DTV and proceeded to watch a few prime time programs in high definition. To say that the picture quality was impressive is an understatement. I was thoroughly impressed with how the picture looked on the various channels and it was even more impressive that this was coming over regular airwaves. As long as the signal strength was above 60%, I experienced a smooth clear picture. It’s really night and day when comparing a regular signal to an HDTV signal. Even watching HDTV on an analog television through a TV out of a card was pretty damn nice. When switching through channels, you’ll be able to see the program name and what resolution the program is coming in. Not all stations broadcast the same as evident by NBC’s 1080i resolution and Fox’s 720p broadcast. And the program name will not always be available through the HDTV signal. I was able to receive all the main channels without having to move my antenna but mileage will vary depending on where you live and what’s around you. Testing in the basement, it was picky at how the antenna was faced while one position pretty much gave me all the channels on the second floor. Of course, the basement isn’t an ideal place to hold an antenna but I was still able to watch each channel by rotating the antenna around when changing channels. Switching channels took about 2-3 seconds: nothing too long.
While watching widescreen programs was fine, anything that wasn’t in HD was displayed in a box. There was no way to stretch the image to take up the whole screen and I found it a little annoying to have a lot of real estate around the picture. If it was a minor box, I wouldn’t have any problems but the amount of black border around a square picture is pretty prominent. Switching aspect ratios had no effect so during most of the day I resorted to watching with the analog signal and only switched to the digital signal at prime time. A way to expand the picture to full screen would’ve greatly helped and I hope to see something like this in future MMC releases.
CPU utilization was at an acceptable level of around 50%. The card doesn’t do hardware encoding so you’ll need a beefier machine. I’m anxious though to see them incorporate a hardware encoding solution to help alleviate the load needed to encode the higher definition signal.
As with normal TV, you can time shift DTV as well. Pairing this feature with high def TV watching sports programs is a sports lover’s dream. The operation worked pretty smoothly and I didn’t experience any problems shifting forward and back. The same can be said for regular TV and MMC handled time shifting well.
While I really enjoyed the picture, the MMC software does seem to need work as I experienced a lock up or two. During some channel changes, I lost sound and eventually got it back by closing out of the program entirely and firing it back up. That happened only once though through my few weeks of viewing. You have the option of saving your time shift files so you can go back and play them. Any programs recorded in DTV are saved as hidden files so you can’t just pull them up. There is an option to export them to other formats though. You’ll also need plenty of hard drive space as the HDTV files do take up a tremendous amount of room and if you want a good amount of time shifting freedom, then you’ll want to invest in a very large dedicated hard drive.
A weird bug I experienced was the disappearance of my mouse cursor when traversing MMC. For example, I would mouse through the Gemstar Guide+ and my cursor would disappear but I could still click on buttons and shows. Same thing would happen when watching TV as my mouse cursor would disappear in the TV window when I was trying to go through the setup.
Another bug that I encountered was a dialog box that kept warning me my hard drive wasn’t in DMA mode. I installed the NVIDIA IDE driver for the NForce system and while the dialog box won’t show up in regular TV mode after I check the box telling me not to remind me, the box always appears when starting up DTV mode even when I tell it not to remind me. The dialog box prevents you from watching DTV until you acknowledge it thereby pulling the user out of EAZYLOOK mode. Yes, it’s a little annoying to have to mouse over to the OK box every single time I start up DTV and I hope ATI fixes this little bug soon.
On the recording side, a dialog box displays when recording shows. Oddly enough, it doesn’t disappear even when I tell the program to hide all controls. The box can be rather distracting when trying to watch a program that’s being recorded and the only way to get it out of the way is to use the mouse and move the box as far off screen as possible. This occurs when you’re not in EAZYLOOK.
The MMC software does seem to start showing its age though compared to more refined programs such as SageTV and BeyondTV. It’s still using the Gemstar Guide+ that I really don’t like and you can’t schedule updates in the background like others. EAZYLOOK and EAZYLAUNCH has made allowed for a better interface to MMC but I think the program needs some work to make it more user friendly. DTV did seem to work better in EAZYLOOK mode and that’s the main mode you’d probably be using if you are hooking the HDTV Wonder to a TV.
Pairing this card with an All-in-Wonder doesn’t allow you to use MultView. Hopefully, there will be an update to let you experience MultView when pairing it with an All-in-Wonder card as I think this would be a great card to pair with. Having DTV with an analog in a PiP window or being able to record two shows at the same time would be a great feature to have.
In the end, the HDTV Wonder is a mixed bag. On one hand I enjoyed the ability to watch HDTV for “free”. On the other, the MMC software isn’t as user friendly as others and there are a few bugs that need to be ironed out. The software is constantly being updated but I feel it’s starting to lag behind a little bit. The bugs and crashes do hinder this product but the updates will come to fix them. That said though, this is the first HDTV product from ATI and history shows they do get better as time goes on.
The card features a Philips tuner and features the ATI NXT2004 chip, which is capable of 70 DTV channels. It also doubles as an analog tuner so you can use it for regular cable signals as well. On the bracket are two coaxial plugs: one for the DTV antenna and one for an analog cable. The third connection allows you to plug the breaker box that’s included with every other All-in-Wonder product. With the breaker box, you have several inputs available. There is no audio cable for this TV card so you don’t have to have a free audio input in order to receive sound. That’s one nice thing I like about this card that some other TV cards have and it’s one less cable to crowd the rear of the computer.
The original Remote Wonder is included with the package and that will disappoint some of those that like the Remote Wonder II. I really like the original Remote Wonder and I’m a little disappointed that the newer model wasn’t included in the package. Either way, the first Remote Wonder is a solid remote that feels pretty good in the hands.
To help get those pesky HDTV signals, the package comes with a very hefty antenna. It may seem old school to have an antenna but you’ll need something to help receive the signal. As you can see from the picture, the antenna is triangular shaped with fins. To help you with orientating the antenna, you can go to http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/welcome.aspx , which displays the channels you can receive and where you should point the antennae to receive the signals. If the included antenna doesn’t do it for you, you can hook the card up to an external antenna which might help you receive the signals better.
My test setup features an AMD 2400+ XP chip with 512MB of ram and an All-in-Wonder 9600XT card. Windows XP was installed with Service Pack 2 and the latest drivers from ATI’s website were used including Catalyst 4.9 with the new Control Center. The card plugs into any free PCI slot and ATI states that it works with any DirectX 9 video card. I didn’t have a NVIDIA GeForce 6 card to test the HDTV Wonder out with but as you can probably guess, the card worked well with the ATI All-in-Wonder product. You do have to be careful on the order of how you install drivers as I did encounter a few problems with the program not running correctly. This was corrected though after a clearing of all ATI software and a reinstall of them.
I wish I could say my installation went smoothly but even with a clean installation I had some lockups. After my third clean install, it seems to be humming fine. What would happen is that File Library would lock up anytime I would play DTV recordings. I also had a few times the program would lock up while watching DTV. There are still some little quirks here and there that I will discuss later in the review with the MMC program.
A new option in MMC is available when you install it titled DTV. This MMC module lets you view HDTV programming using the HDTV Wonder. After successful installation of the software, I fired up the program and was taken through the familiar wizard setup. The program does an autoscan of the airwaves to find any HDTV signals broadcasting in your area. You’ll be able to see a graphical representation of the signal strength and hear an audio cue when you are in the program’s setup. The GUI for DTV is pretty much the same as the regular TV module.
So after everything was setup, I fired up DTV and proceeded to watch a few prime time programs in high definition. To say that the picture quality was impressive is an understatement. I was thoroughly impressed with how the picture looked on the various channels and it was even more impressive that this was coming over regular airwaves. As long as the signal strength was above 60%, I experienced a smooth clear picture. It’s really night and day when comparing a regular signal to an HDTV signal. Even watching HDTV on an analog television through a TV out of a card was pretty damn nice. When switching through channels, you’ll be able to see the program name and what resolution the program is coming in. Not all stations broadcast the same as evident by NBC’s 1080i resolution and Fox’s 720p broadcast. And the program name will not always be available through the HDTV signal. I was able to receive all the main channels without having to move my antenna but mileage will vary depending on where you live and what’s around you. Testing in the basement, it was picky at how the antenna was faced while one position pretty much gave me all the channels on the second floor. Of course, the basement isn’t an ideal place to hold an antenna but I was still able to watch each channel by rotating the antenna around when changing channels. Switching channels took about 2-3 seconds: nothing too long.
While watching widescreen programs was fine, anything that wasn’t in HD was displayed in a box. There was no way to stretch the image to take up the whole screen and I found it a little annoying to have a lot of real estate around the picture. If it was a minor box, I wouldn’t have any problems but the amount of black border around a square picture is pretty prominent. Switching aspect ratios had no effect so during most of the day I resorted to watching with the analog signal and only switched to the digital signal at prime time. A way to expand the picture to full screen would’ve greatly helped and I hope to see something like this in future MMC releases.
CPU utilization was at an acceptable level of around 50%. The card doesn’t do hardware encoding so you’ll need a beefier machine. I’m anxious though to see them incorporate a hardware encoding solution to help alleviate the load needed to encode the higher definition signal.
As with normal TV, you can time shift DTV as well. Pairing this feature with high def TV watching sports programs is a sports lover’s dream. The operation worked pretty smoothly and I didn’t experience any problems shifting forward and back. The same can be said for regular TV and MMC handled time shifting well.
While I really enjoyed the picture, the MMC software does seem to need work as I experienced a lock up or two. During some channel changes, I lost sound and eventually got it back by closing out of the program entirely and firing it back up. That happened only once though through my few weeks of viewing. You have the option of saving your time shift files so you can go back and play them. Any programs recorded in DTV are saved as hidden files so you can’t just pull them up. There is an option to export them to other formats though. You’ll also need plenty of hard drive space as the HDTV files do take up a tremendous amount of room and if you want a good amount of time shifting freedom, then you’ll want to invest in a very large dedicated hard drive.
A weird bug I experienced was the disappearance of my mouse cursor when traversing MMC. For example, I would mouse through the Gemstar Guide+ and my cursor would disappear but I could still click on buttons and shows. Same thing would happen when watching TV as my mouse cursor would disappear in the TV window when I was trying to go through the setup.
Another bug that I encountered was a dialog box that kept warning me my hard drive wasn’t in DMA mode. I installed the NVIDIA IDE driver for the NForce system and while the dialog box won’t show up in regular TV mode after I check the box telling me not to remind me, the box always appears when starting up DTV mode even when I tell it not to remind me. The dialog box prevents you from watching DTV until you acknowledge it thereby pulling the user out of EAZYLOOK mode. Yes, it’s a little annoying to have to mouse over to the OK box every single time I start up DTV and I hope ATI fixes this little bug soon.
On the recording side, a dialog box displays when recording shows. Oddly enough, it doesn’t disappear even when I tell the program to hide all controls. The box can be rather distracting when trying to watch a program that’s being recorded and the only way to get it out of the way is to use the mouse and move the box as far off screen as possible. This occurs when you’re not in EAZYLOOK.
The MMC software does seem to start showing its age though compared to more refined programs such as SageTV and BeyondTV. It’s still using the Gemstar Guide+ that I really don’t like and you can’t schedule updates in the background like others. EAZYLOOK and EAZYLAUNCH has made allowed for a better interface to MMC but I think the program needs some work to make it more user friendly. DTV did seem to work better in EAZYLOOK mode and that’s the main mode you’d probably be using if you are hooking the HDTV Wonder to a TV.
Pairing this card with an All-in-Wonder doesn’t allow you to use MultView. Hopefully, there will be an update to let you experience MultView when pairing it with an All-in-Wonder card as I think this would be a great card to pair with. Having DTV with an analog in a PiP window or being able to record two shows at the same time would be a great feature to have.
In the end, the HDTV Wonder is a mixed bag. On one hand I enjoyed the ability to watch HDTV for “free”. On the other, the MMC software isn’t as user friendly as others and there are a few bugs that need to be ironed out. The software is constantly being updated but I feel it’s starting to lag behind a little bit. The bugs and crashes do hinder this product but the updates will come to fix them. That said though, this is the first HDTV product from ATI and history shows they do get better as time goes on.
I love the picture of the HDTV Wonder and the fact that you can snag the major networks for free. The software needs updating though and the card doesn't have hardware encoding.
Rating: 7.3 Average
* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.
About Author
Odyssey2, Baby! That’s where it all began for me. Sure my friends all swore by their Atari 2600s, but to me there was nothing better than Pick Axe Pete or K.C. Munchkin! Intellivision? Colecovision? Please! Give me Artillery Duel and my trusty Bally Astrocade (which even by today’s standards might have had the best controllers of any console ever)! Commodore 64? Ha! We had the Atari ST! Ah, the good ole days...
Since then, I’ve owned and loved just about every major video game console and many, many PCs. These days, when I’m not at my day job as a software developer or scarring the crap out of my pets with my musical dis-arrangements, you can find me playing pretty much whatever the latest greatest FPS happens to be on PC or whatever game is in vogue on the latest consoles. (Although, I have been known to still fire up the old Oddysey2 emulator from time to time!)
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