HDTV Wonder Discussion

[yukit]

The silver sensor clone that came with HDTV Wonder does work fine for a few OTA HDTV channels in the UHF range.

I am wondering what can I do to improve the reception for other choppy channels in UHF range & one VHF channel I am interested (NBC affliate KNTV channel 12)

Terk HDTVa seems to be pretty popular for a low cost, indoor solution.
I can also get a signal amplifier for the ATI antenna, which may be equivalent to the Terk HDTVa. I don't know how well these antenna work for the VHF channel. Right now, I don't get any picture at all.

I have been searching for this info on the web, general consensus seems to be that ATI antenna & silver sensor do a pretty good job so people need to upgrade to an outdoor antenna solution to get much better reception.
An outdoor antenna is not an option for me, so a small incremental reception increase is good enough for me.

What is your experience?

BTW, I have not been able to get ATI TV tuner software to work on my new HTPC system. I get a video overlay error at initialization. Fortunately, MCE 2005 works fine with the kram driver. I also have AIW 9600XT with T200 driver on the system. MCE has been working for me well enough, otherwise I would go back to MMC 9.06.

[sechs]

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=369015

[yukit]

Originally Posted by sechs

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=369015

Very informative link, thanks.
This would take me a while to digest the mult-page thread though.

[rack04]

Like many other people I had a heck of a time getting my HDTV Wonder installed and working. Now some 6 months later I'm wondering if there is any benefit to installing the newest CAT drivers. Since I only have a ATI 9800Pro I'm debating if the trouble is worth the possible performance in the upgrade. Thanks.

[sechs]

Since both cards are EOLed, you're not likely to get any gain from new drivers. So, if you aren't having a problem, don't try to fix it!

[yukit]

Originally Posted by rack04

Like many other people I had a heck of a time getting my HDTV Wonder installed and working. Now some 6 months later I'm wondering if there is any benefit to installing the newest CAT drivers. Since I only have a ATI 9800Pro I'm debating if the trouble is worth the possible performance in the upgrade. Thanks.

Probably not.
Last weekend, I decided to reinstall the ATI drivers & MMC to see if I can get MMC to work with my HDTV Wonder & AIW 9600XT, so I installed the latest CAT 7.5 driver. No difference. MMC TV still does not work (the same initialize error), but MCE2005 does work. I have not noticed much difference.

The update was supposed to be something to do with the broadcast flag, & some game related driver fixes.

[rack04]

Thanks everyone you probably just saved me a serious headache.

[03HDFATBOY]

I used to have my HDTV wonder working with Vista and after a reformat and fresh install I can't get it to work. Has anyone got any tips?

[asilvernighta]

I was having a hard time using hdtv wonder with vista 64bit, everything would automatically install, even tried kram. I could detect signals in vista's windows media center (wmc) but no picture (it would say no signal when you flip to the channels supposedly having full bars)...then I was messing with the computer one day and took out 2 sticks of 1gb because I had 4gb of ram total and it worked! I can watch hdtv ota with my hdtv wonder on my vista 64bit So perhaps having 4gb is related to the issue? *shrugs* I know I had so many windows xp (32bit) issues with 4gb ram such as calculator not functioning properly when switching between windows at the same time.

[paulgo]

I do not have any problem with Vista 64 home premium and 4 GB of memory using the May 2008 (and previous) drivers. I do have a problem with the June 2008 drivers. When I install this driver my ATI 650 TV tuner card is not detected. These drivers seem to corrupt the registry because if I uninstall them and reinstall the May drivers I still get the same error message. The only solution is to do a system recover to go back to the May drivers. I have put in a trouble ticket with ATI and sent them the information they requested on June 25th but I am still waiting for a reply.

[paulgo]

Respomce from ATI:

I fear we may be looking at something just odd, possibly a bug with 8.6 driver. You might be in your best interest to see if Catalyst 8.7 will clear it up. A fellow colleague here pointed me to this suggestion.

Is there any reason to which you want/need to update to Catalyst 8.6 driver? Catalyst 8.6 should, naturally, work.. and we do support it but if waiting for 8.7 is viable.. I would suggest it at this point at stick with 8.5.

[yukit]

I am resurrecting my old HDTV Wonder card in a WinXP Media Center box to mainly watch the S-Video/composite feed.

I am not really interested in the digital or analog feeds, though OTA digital would be a bonus.

I don't care to use the card with MCE since I already have another card for it.

Which version of MMC is considered to be the best for this purpose?
Should I stick with the latest 9.16 version? Or I would be better off using the older version like 9.08 that had separate tuner & HDTV modules?

Ultimately, I want a tuner app that works with all my inputs.
Should I look at apps like BeyondTV or PowerCinema?

[paulgo]

I tried Catalyst 8.7 today. It also is a disaster (same problems as 8.6) so again I had to do a system restore to go back to 8.5.

[paulgo]

I tried Catalyst 8.8 today. It also is a disaster - back to 8.5!

[paulgo]

I just got this from ATI customer support (9/11/08).

"We have reproduced the issue now and have sent to engineering for investigation. The workaround right now is to use the 8.5 driver."

[paulgo]

The new drivers (8.11)work with my PCI 650 tuner card! I first uninstalled the old drivers and rebooted. The new drivers initially caused a blue screen of death, but after yet another reboot I was able to do the install without any problems. My operating system is Vista 64.

[paulgo]

The latest drivers (June 2009) still cause a blue screen on first install, a reinstall works fine.

One additional problem, not that Comcast is putting many more unscrambled digital channels up the tuner or the software is having some problems when there are multiple standard definition channels (over six) on one frequency. Most of the time the video just freezes.