Rating: 
Summary: Was a wonder, until...
Review: ...I've owned the tv card for well over a year now. I still think tv cards are great but... ATI driver issues strike again. I've since tried to install windows XP on my machine. Unfortunately, after much trouble it was all in vain. I can nolonger recommend this card until the ATI fixes its XP support. In the meantime, i run windows 98se and still watch tv on the TV Wonder.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent card....
Review: After reading some of the negative reviews about this card, it is very clear that those running XP are giving up on this card WAY TO EARLY and just are frustrated. I have a P4/1800 and this card didn't want to work with XP at first, and XP will do its best to try to not allow you to install it. The trick is to keep plugging away and then downloading the XP drivers for this card from the ATI website. Installation is a bit hectic, and those with no patience could become frustrated because Microsoft has not yet digitially tested this product for XP. But I assure you it works fine and works very well.
Rating: 
Summary: More Features than Performance
Review: After reading some of the reviews, I bought this card anticipating some difficulty with installation. However, I had no difficulty at all with the installation. The TV functionality worked immediately. My disappointment really began afterward.... Let's start by saying that if you just want to watch TV on your computer, this product works well. It's the other features that bring about the disappointment. If your experience is like mine, don't plan on doing anything with closed-captioning. The vast majority of the time, the captions are garbled beyond usability. You might as well forget the "hot word" capability and other features leveraged off closed-captioning, as well. I also found the video capture disappointing. If you use the proprietary AVI format, you can do simple editing. However, the video quality will be sub-VCR, and the file size large. To add further aggravation, the sync between sound and video is terrible. And finally, the video player crashes when running full screen, and since the format is proprietary, one can only play the resulting video with the ATI player. Recording in MPEG-1 format is much better. With an adequately powerful computer (this machine is a P-III 667EB), you can produce videos with reasonable file size, with pretty good sync between sound and video, and decent image quality, though still sub-VCR. You can also play these files on any MPEG-1 capable player. However, you will not be able to edit these files. All in all, if you want to make video recordings, you are probably better off with a VCR in front of your TV-Wonder card. In general, I would recommend an MPEG-2 solution if you really want to do anything serious with video capture on your computer. Now for the bad news... This solution is predominately software based. Real-time applications such as those provided with this product are always prone to difficulties in the Windows 9x environment. With the software for this product, I have experienced numerous "blue screen of death" crashes, and crashes to re-boot (one second your computer is running, the next second it is rebooting of its own accord). I have had more crashes in the course of a couple of days with this software, than I have experienced in the last several years of my computer experience for all my other applications combined. Admittedly, I'm running this software on an extremely loaded "family" machine. But then again, what use is software that can't play well with others? To provide further annoyance, there are numerous non-crash bugs. For instance, in the video editor, if you change the counter to display time instead of frames, the frame step feature no longer works correctly. This makes editing tough! Also, I'm suspicious that this software package damaged my DirectX installation. I am suddenly experiencing collateral problems with games, etc. since the install. I dread fixing this problem. A re-install of DirectX already failed to make any improvement, though the diagnostic tool still dutifully tells me that the installation is broken...here we go! In summary, I'll put things in perspective. The performance of the raw TV functionality is very good with this product. Everything else marginally works. With care most crashes can be avoided, and the basic functionality of the digital VCR can be useful with subdued expectations. A hardware-based MPEG-2 solution (available from Pinnacle and others) will provide far superior results. But, we're talking at least ... vs. ... for the TV-Wonder. Given the price and the TV functionality, I give the TV-wonder a two star rating.
Rating:
Summary: Good Hardware, Bad Software - Easy Fix
Review: ATI shot itself in the foot with this one. The All In Wonder card is a pretty good piece of hardware bundled with one of the worst software packages I've seen in ages. It takes awhile to figure that out. When using new brand features, how is the casual user supposed to know the difference between hardware and software problems? If ATI either stripped out all of the bundled software and told buyers to find their own or, heaven forbid, packaged the card with good software, they'd have an excellent product. As it is, buy a Tivo. If you're committed to video capture at home, I'd recommend "Beyond TV 3" as a software replacement. It has a very Tivo-like interface. At $60, it isn't cheap, but it is a one time fee with plenty of ongoing service. Now, our picture recording quality is about on par with a VHS recording (with ATI's software it looked like a bad expressionist painting). The weekly updated TV listings are easy to read and navigate, and the recording system is a breeze. As packaged, this product is horribly disapointing. If you're willing to put a little work (and a little extra money) into it, you can get 80% of the functionality of a Tivo with the extra added bonus of getting to keep your favourite recordings.
Rating: 
Summary: Works great!
Review: Boy did I experience buyers remorse after reading the negative reviews on this page. I almost cancelled my order. Luckily, I decided to give it a shot but was fully prepared to return it. This card works great! TV tuner and vid capture are amazing for a... card. I am even able to import video from a VHS-C camcorder and save it as MPEG-1 for viewing on a PC. Beware: doco stinks. Be prepared to figure out a lot of things by yourself. I have a Pentium IV, Windows ME, 1.3 ghz with 16 mb NVIDIA video card.
Rating: 
Summary: My experience?
Review: Buy an All-in-wonder from ATI, buy a video card from ATI, maybe even buy a used car from these people. But I can't recommend buying their add-on TV tuner cards. Long story short--I spent 2 hours on my own trying to install this beast. I spent almost 4 hours on the phone to Toronto with a very knowledgable, helpful and pleasant ATI technician. After trying everything he knew, he was going to Overnite a new card to me. Later that night, the Tuner card application crashed. Then the install disk crashed. I decided to save up for a Radeon All-in-Wonder. ATI' technician was honest with me. He told me he wished the company wouldn't sell this card. 1)Never got the audio portion of this card to work. 2)The quality of the video is rather jerky and full of digital artifact. 3)The closed captioning garbled the words pretty badly. Oh by the way, I am running an ATI Rage Fury in my wintel machine that has never been buggy or had problems other than those induced by Win98 updates that were fixed by downloading drivers from ATI's excellent website.
Rating:
Summary: Great Value-Highly Recomended
Review: I am a college student and i didn't had TV in my dorm room. But i have a brand new computer with a nice 19" monitor. I bought the Value Edition (VE) of this card for [price] shipped. The only difference is that VE does not have stereo sound and it can record only in AVI format. Some reviews said that the image quality was not that good. On my 900Mhz, 256MB Ram, 32MB video system this card produce a better than a regular TV image. So by using the full screen mode with my 19" Samsung monitor i have a great 19" TV with way more fetures than a regular TV for just [price] !!
Rating:
Summary: They dont call it the TV-Blunder for nothing
Review: I am happy that most of these reviews reflect better experiences than most have had with this card (judging by other online reviews). Personally, the TV-Wonder has never functioned properly on my system (which is totally juiced up). It consistenly freezes and shuts down my system. ATI support has also been lacking in that the company is slow to respond and generally unwilling to support software and current drivers. Good Luck with your TV-Wonder. My experience has been horrible.
Rating:
Summary: A virus would crash my computer for free
Review: I bought this card, not knowing anything about video cards or the like, and had problems from the start. Once I finally got it installed properly, I couldn't get any video feed through either the cable TV jack or the composite cable jack. Well, after fiddling with it for hours, I finally got video...but no sound. I still get no sound, and it's taken up the habit of crashing my computer without warning or any kind of discernable pattern. On the rare occasion that I can get it to work properly, it captures beautiful video and screen-shots, but I don't think the 95% of the times that end in rebooting are worth it.
Rating:
Summary: If it says ATI, Look the other way!!!SERIOUSLY FOLKS!
Review: I dont know where to start...
Sure it says Win2K compatible, but not really.
The install procedure is very complicated, terse, unpleasant.
The first time I attempted to install the drivers, it re-booted to a blue screen. Requiring me to reinstall the OS, then try again...So I eventually get it to work, no help from ATI(we all know about ATI's prize winning support) I start the app, start flipping through channels, hit a weak station and my system freezes. It only starts there, So if the TV app has any problems, which it often does, Your system will take at least 20min to shut down gracefully. So what about features, the ability to view all stations simultaneously -doesnt work(will hang the app). Look and feel, not as nice as the old ATI interface. So you say, sounds like you need to call tech support....
Yeah right we're talking ATI here, there IS_NO_TECH_SUPPORT.
At least they dont respond to emails. Not to mention the hoops you must jump through to get to the help form, that you guessed it -doesn't work. So after waiting weeks for any reply to SEVERAL
emails I've decided to return it as it doesnt work as advertised nor, is it supported. All in all - A real bad experience, and I want the world to know. Oh yeah, that should be ZERO stars, not 1.
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