TV Wonder 650 Combo PCIe HDTV just hit the markette - how good is it?

[William]

I see that Newegg has the ATI TV Wonder 650 PCIe HDTV Combo available under
the VisionTek label as of today. This is a dual digital tuner with on-board
3d comb filter and mpeg2 encoder. Receives off-air and cable NTSC / FM and
off-air and cable ATSC / Clear QAM.

I am as much interested in the software used to run this card as the cards
performance. I was wondering if anyone has one in their machine and can
give us a report.

Does anyone have one running under Win XP pro with the mce remote working?
How is the snap-shot mode when viewing 1080p/i?
How is skipping from channel to channel (Surfing) - fast/slow?
How is the volume from NTSC to ATSC to recorded material?
How is the FM tuner - integrated, record function?

I have a Hauppauge HVR-1800 with similar hardware, but I don't particularly
like the software that runs the card.


William

 

[bennor3814]

I see that Newegg has the ATI TV Wonder 650 PCIe HDTV Combo available under
the VisionTek label as of today. This is a dual digital tuner with
on-board 3d comb filter and mpeg2 encoder. Receives off-air and cable NTSC
/ FM and off-air and cable ATSC / Clear QAM.

I am as much interested in the software used to run this card as the cards
performance. I was wondering if anyone has one in their machine and can
give us a report.

Does anyone have one running under Win XP pro with the mce remote working?
How is the snap-shot mode when viewing 1080p/i?
How is skipping from channel to channel (Surfing) - fast/slow?
How is the volume from NTSC to ATSC to recorded material?
How is the FM tuner - integrated, record function?

Cannot speak to some of the questions as I don't have these new 650 PCIe
versions. I do however have an older 650 PCI version from last year and have
been looking at comments from users who have tried the new Visiontek 650
PCIe and USB versions to see if the QAM works on XP, and if these new units
are worth it. Look around at the various forms, as of now isn't clear if
ANYONE has been able to get QAM to work in Vista and with what software with
these new dual tuners from Visiontek. What is clear is that the marketing
materials and package contents don't make it clear (or even vaguely clear)
that apparently the QAM is ONLY supported on Vista and then ONLY on CMC in
Vista. Take a look at the Visiontek forms and you will see that some people
are having trouble just getting the tuners to work and then are having
trouble getting Media Center Edition (in Vista) to properly detect the two
tuners.

And there is also some talk that these new dual tuners from ATI/Visiontek
don't allow for true dual digital tuning. Not a big surprise as similar
confusion existed last year when the initial "hybrid" 650 tuner came out and
some of us on the Rage3d forum were speculating that something similar would
happen again with these dual tuners. According to this NCIX form link,
http://forum.ncix.com/forums/index....419865&product_id=0&forumid=215&pcbuilderid=0,
one cannot record digital on one channel while recording digital on the
other. Apparently one tuner is configured for analog and the other for
digital.

It also isn't clear if the newer version of CMC has fixed the bugs that
existed, AND were never fixed, in the previous version of CMC. Namely the
720p digital OTA HDTV recorded audio getting out of sync with the video
after 25+ minutes of recording.

I've dumped using CMC and have gone with using BeyondTV with an ATI 650 PCI.
I've also gone with using the HDHomeRun to get unencrypted QAM in Windows
XP. HDHomeRun is the only device I've seen so far (and I could be wrong)
that will really do unencrypted QAM and at the same time will work in
Windows XP. HDHomeRun does have it's own issues, but once I got it working I
am able to get a bunch (6-8 or so) local unencrypted HD QAM channels, along
with 20 or so non-hd mostly local channels with Comcast. I've posted some of
the things I've found with the combination of Windows XP with BeyondTV,
HDHomeRun, and a previous ATI 650 PCI card at this link:
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33906851