online said:
How does ATI HDTV Wonder compare to MyHD MDP-130 and Dvico Fusion 5?
All three are popular HDTV cards for PC.
I want something that can does OTA DTV for the days that I don't have
cable. I also want the product to take cable or satellite video feeds
if I do have them.
I heard the Fusion 5 card features some LG 5th generation chipset that
does wonderful things. I heard by comparison, ATI HDTV Wonder picks
up fewer OTA channel than other two. What's your user opinion?
I want to go with ATI as I've had ATI AIW 8500-DV for years and it
performed well for my TV need. When I run TV, the CPU usage is
between 5% to15%. At 35% if I have it do recording in DVD quality.
Normally I can do other things on my PC without any side effects. How
high will CPU usage go for ATI HDTV Wonder?
For recording HD CPU utilization on any reasonably modern machine is
negligible. It comes preencoded and precompressed and all that the machine
has to do is extract the bitstream and transcribe it to the disk. Playback
is another story and there the utilization can be quite high. The 8500's
DXVA gives a good boost--I haven't noticed any difference between that and
a 9800 but haven't had a chance to do a direct comparison yet. Some of the
6000 series nvidia boards supposedly have an improved DXVA decoder that
gives better HD performance than ATI, but I've not tested this so can't say
for sure.
I don't have an HDTV Wonder, but I do have a Dvico Fusion 2 and a Fusion 5
Gold and of the two, so far (on about four hours experience--it arrived
today) the 5 seems to pick up the signal more reliably than the 2, which
had a lot of trouble with some of the stations in my area. On that basis
I'd say that the 5 is a better bet than the ATI.
There's also the issue of software--the Dvico boards work with MCE an using
either the Dvico or the nvidia decoder and seem to actually work better
with the nvidia, and the models through Fusion 3 are apparently supported
under Linux as well--presumably the 5s will be in a future release.
One big drawback of the HDTV Wonder is that even under MCE you can only use
one in a machine--under MCE and some other third-party software you can
have two Dvicos and record two channels simultaneously.
The Dvico can record unencrypted QAM signals which means that it can record
some but not all HD cable--the ATI hardware supposedly has this capability
but it is not supported in any available software for the ATI. If you want
to record HD off of DirecTV or Dish then you'd do better to get their HD
recorder--the best bet would be DirecTV with an HDTivo as that's a
semi-open machine that you can do tricks with. None of the US-standard
boards for a PC can record HD satellite. There are some European-spec
boards, from Dvico and other vendors, that can but only in an area served
by European-spec satellite.
Note by the way, that the ATI Multimedia Center will in some releases tune
analog channels on a Dvico Fusion II and otherwise behave just as if it was
an ATI board--don't know if it will also do so on the 5. The same is not
true for HD.
