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Rating: 
Summary: Unusable on my Windows 2000 computer.
Review: I bought the All-in-Wonder Radeon 9000 card because it combines high quality TV tuner and video capture capabilities. I wanted the digital equivalent of TV and VCR functionality, without the hassle of videotape. This card also came with a handy remote control.When this card worked, it was amazing, but when it didn't, it made my entire computer unusable. In the end, I had to return it to the store. The tech support folks at the store told me that upgrading to Windows XP might help, because that is a more multi-media friendly operating system. I didn't want to spend the time and money doing that, and ended up buying a Hauppauge PVR250 TV card, which I've been very happy with. Simply put, the ATI card's main problem was that it was not stable on my Windows 2000 computer. After installation, the computer would crash or lock up every few minutes, and when it wasn't crashing, the TV tuner showed jerky video, with frequent total failures of audio. When I tried installing the card under Windows Me, the above problems improved, but Windows 2000 is a much better operating system (because it never crashes, except when this ATI card is installed) and I wasn't about to reinstall all my other programs under an inferior operating system just for this video card. Nonetheless, when it did work, I was mightily impressed with the quality of the TV picture, which was noticeably sharper than the cheaper TV tuner cards out there (e.g. the TV Wonder VE made by the same company). The video capture was impressive, capable of making digital copies indistinguishable from the original analog video. There is also a handy Guide Plus program that shows you a grid of TV shows and channels. It downloads a week's worth of TV-guide listings from a central server, and makes it easy to record current or upcoming TV shows with one or two mouse clicks. The remote control was also AWESOME - it can control not only the ATI card, but also any other program you specify. You could browse the web remotely with it, for instance. Furthermore, the remote is radio-controlled, not infrared, which means you don't have to point it at the TV for it to work. I found that I really liked this feature. This card has several other innovative features that I haven't seen in any other similar product. These include the ability to play back video at FASTER than the original speed, WITH NORMAL-PITCHED AUDIO. This is handy if, like me, you are always wishing for more hours in the day to do everything you need to do. If this card was stable on my computer, it would have been a very nice product, at a reasonable price. If even then, I wasn't entirely pleased. Besides the instability and crashing, I thought the user interface was poorly designed, for the following reasons: 1. The TV-watching is best in full-screen mode, but the volume/channel changing buttons are on a gigantic pallette that covers up an unnecessarily large fraction of the screen. It can be hidden, but then the much-needed volume/channel buttons are inaccessible. Even though I only had the card for a couple of days, this drove me nuts. 2. On-screen TV displays sometimes mysteriously fail to appear when expected. This is annoying because they show you valuable information like the current channel number. 3. The remote control, although handy, has buttons that feel soft and gooey, making it hard to tell if you've pushed a button or not. Several important buttons are so close together that they are difficult to operate. 4. There is one piece of good news: ATI is constantly releasing updated drivers and software, presumably because the originals were so buggy. The bad news for me was that even the latest versions did not fix my instability problem, and in a few cases made things worse. All in all, I would recommend that you make sure the store has a good return policy before you buy this. If it works for you, it will give you high quality pictures, a handy TV-Guide grid, and lots of interesting features, but with a somewhat poorly designed user interface. Personally I have switched to a Hauppauge PVR250 card, combined with software from SnapStream, which I've been very happy with.
Rating: 
Summary: Great card for multimedia PC
Review: I got this card because I always wanted a multimedia PC. So far, I am not disappointed. I can watch VCD and DVD on my PC, transfer my old videos onto VCD or DVD, and use my PC to record TV programs. The record feature is great for when I need to record something on short notice and I don't have to search for a blank tape. I can record in VCD or DVD quality or somewhere in between. If I use VCD or DVD quality, the output is in MPEG format so I can watch using almost any viewer. There are a few downsides though that I caused me not to give this card 5 stars:
1. The DVD and VCD players aren't 100% compatible. I have trouble with some VCD and DVD menus while the same titles ran fine on my DVD players. 2. There is a hidden 60 Hz refresh rate limit that made my screen flicker. Even when I set my monitor to 75 Hz, the driver still uses 60 Hz. I spent many days figuring out how to override the 60 Hz limit. Downloading the newest driver did not help. Here is how I fixed my system: For WinXP, right-click on the desktop to get to Display Properties, select Settings tab, select Advanced, then select Displays tab with the ATI logo. Select Monitor and change the refresh rate limit. For Win98, it is trickier as I changed the registry. Run Regedit and do a search on "DALR6" without matching whole string. Under the same key where it's found, add a new binary value of "DALR6 CRT_Info". The data for this is 772 bytes :( The first 21 bytes are 40 06 00 00 b0 04 00 00 78 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01. The remaining 751 bytes are all 00. Keep entering 00 until the address on the left is 300 hex, enter 4 00s on this last line. Then reboot and the refresh rate limit should be raised to 120 Hz. Other than these 2 minor issues, I'm very happy with this graphics card.
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