HDTV Wonder Discussion

[Liuke]

Originally Posted by jgs9455

Does anyone know how this card handles the broadcast flag?
I get mine today

According to this article here the answer appears to be that the HDTV Wonder will ignore it. If you go to the broadcast flag section of that article, they say that HDTV tuners will ignore it until July 2005 so you should be good to go.

[tristancarton]

Whoo Hooo. Just bought a brand new ATI HDTV Wonder off ebay. I am one of those kids that had an original wintv, then a wintv-d (sitting in closet uninstalled due to crappy interface and driver), then a aiw 7500, then two 8500dvs(one sittign in closet and one my friend is borrowing becuase his video card fried) and now I am primed for full hdtv resolution. I just hope I can get it to install on windows server 2003 and that my pentium 1133s aren't too slow to decode the channels. Anyhow I have been waiting for a full hdtv resolution tuner from a large company for some time and I will certainly give you guys some sort of review when I receive it. So pumped for next week.

By the way for those thinking of getting one off newegg I emailed them and they still have no eta on the cards.

Hope ati keeps selling these. We need alot of these sold so we can get driver and support attention from ati. Let's see the masses follow the exodus towards hdtv on the pc.

[MMC Oracle]

Little problem, if you check here:
http://www.ati.com/products/hdtvwonder/specs.html

You'll see there is no support for your OS. (Actually, its Win XP SP1 that is required).

Another upgrade in your system possible?

[ben6]

Originally Posted by MMC Oracle

Little problem, if you check here:
http://www.ati.com/products/hdtvwonder/specs.html

You'll see there is no support for your OS. (Actually, its Win XP SP1 that is required).

Another upgrade in your system possible?

Yeah I would STRONGLY suggest a faster CPU. My only gripe with my HDTV Wonder is that I miss one channel I normally watch (I watch Pyramid on a local channel hehe) and therefore have to use the analogue tuner lol for that one show.

[Grimister]

Well I set up a small 10 gig drive in my system and tried win2000 pro and no luck on the HDTV tuner, the driver is Yellowed out in the device manager. Now the Analog side shows up but no go on the HDTV tuner driver


Now getting any other program to capture from the HDTV tuner side of this card will most likely be a long way off, HDTV is an MPEG2 stream, just like a DVD, but only streamed on a channel. The DTV software runs the tuner and loads the mpeg2 codecs for showing the stream, the picture is already in mpeg2 format all the software does is show you the stream while saving it to the hard drive. This is sort of like the hauppauge wintv250 card with hardware mpeg2 compression, you see the already compressed stream with mpreg2 playback codecs in the tv veiwing application.

[jgs9455]

Originally Posted by Liuke

According to this article here the answer appears to be that the HDTV Wonder will ignore it. If you go to the broadcast flag section of that article, they say that HDTV tuners will ignore it until July 2005 so you should be good to go.

I don't know how I missed that Tom's article...hmmm. Thanks for the insight though. I just hope that ATi won't release a driver next year that enables the flag - we will just have to keep watch. Now if they release the HDTV Wonder 2 next year at this time, we will all know why.

BTW - I got my HDTV Wonder today from buy.com. 1st comment - what a silly looking box this thing came in. Anyways, I haven't even installed it yet - I was up till midnight building a new mountain bike. I guess you can only do one hobby at a time!

[tristancarton]

Originally Posted by df13

I have it and it works in W2K....but I've also found out you have to an ATI videocard for it to work properly...

Originally Posted by Grimister

Well I set up a small 10 gig drive in my system and tried win2000 pro and no luck on the HDTV tuner, the driver is Yellowed out in the device manager. Now the Analog side shows up but no go on the HDTV tuner driver

ohhhh conflicting reports. muahaha. can't wait to have some fun next week. (I love troubleshooting hardware and software. Really no sarcasm in that response.)

[tristancarton]

Update to previous post. Emailed newegg two days ago they said no eta on hdtv wonder.

Searched on newegg website today. Ati hdtv wonder available and only 187.99 with 3 fedex saver 3 day shipping. Damnit wtf. Anyhow go get 'em.

[Grimister]

Well I erased the 10 gig and set up winxp on it with an nvidia Ti4400 128 meg video card. The HDTV seems to work fine so far, although I think the video quality of mpeg2 looks better on the ATI. Just thought some of those folks out there that use ATI capture cards with other brands of video cards would like to know. Time to switch my system back to my AIW9700 pro.

[jorwex]

2 things

why does the HDTV wonder always stay on timeshifting? does that mean you can't record like we normally can w/ our AIWs? Does the fact that it stays on timeshifting eat up harddrive space? I read a few posts back that it never hits the harddrive..which doesnt make sense to me.

also, why does ati include the WDM drivers in their display drivers instead of w/ the multimedia center pacakge? that's always baffled me.

thanks

[grog]

The ATI HDTV WONDER is not an analog tuner but a digitial one.
As digital data is received the data must be collected to present to the user as video content.

As it happens the data received is MPEG format and as such there is no encoding process that takes place. What does take place is the MPEG data is stored to the hard drive as it is received. Since this step is required the added benifit to the user is timeshifting is always available since the data is already there and no encoding is required.

When you timeshift using AIW cards with Analog content MPEG encoding must take place in real-time.

So yes, hard disk space is used. A lot of data is moved to display a single frame!

TV-ON-DEMAND with my 9700-AIW over S-VIDEO takes 56.548% of the CPU.
Watching and recording with the HDTV Wonder in 720P content is about 20% of the CPU.

You may set the maximun space used for TV-ON-DEMAND with the ATI HDTV WONDER card,



Hope that helps.

Greg

Originally Posted by jorwex

2 things

why does the HDTV wonder always stay on timeshifting? does that mean you can't record like we normally can w/ our AIWs? Does the fact that it stays on timeshifting eat up harddrive space? I read a few posts back that it never hits the harddrive..which doesnt make sense to me.

also, why does ati include the WDM drivers in their display drivers instead of w/ the multimedia center pacakge? that's always baffled me.

thanks

[xsvcd]

Has anyone determined if the HDTV Wonder will work with the ATI 8500DV AIW? It has 64 Megs of ram and I have mine installed with directx 9c so should it work on my system? I ordered one on Friday from Amazon ($196 with 2-day delivery). Will this card work in conjunction with my All-in-Wonder card? I guess theoretically I should be able to capture from OTA HD, OTA SD digital, co-axial Analog cable, and Digital cable(via svideo out of my cable box) and then output it to my 50” High Def TV at 720p through the component cables. I will let you know if it works.

[EMunEeE]

Does anyone use their HDTV Wonder in conjunction with an Audigy 2. There are reports of audio stuttering with the Audigy 2 and HDTV Wonder and I have an Audigy 2.

?

[tristancarton]

Originally Posted by xsvcd

Has anyone determined if the HDTV Wonder will work with the ATI 8500DV AIW? It has 64 Megs of ram and I have mine installed with directx 9c so should it work on my system? I ordered one on Friday from Amazon ($196 with 2-day delivery). Will this card work in conjunction with my All-in-Wonder card? I guess theoretically I should be able to capture from OTA HD, OTA SD digital, co-axial Analog cable, and Digital cable(via svideo out of my cable box) and then output it to my 50” High Def TV at 720p through the component cables. I will let you know if it works.

Originally Posted by MrEMan4k

Does anyone use their HDTV Wonder in conjunction with an Audigy 2. There are reports of audio stuttering with the Audigy 2 and HDTV Wonder and I have an Audigy 2.

?

I will look into both questions when I receive mine late this week and will update accordingly if no one has responded since then.

Definately interested to see how ati handles the all in wonder card along with the hdtv wonder side by side = pulling good old 8500dv out of the box.(I wonder if they handle it as dual tuner cards that will let you get picture in picture)

[xsvcd]

MrEMan4k I am planning on using my HDTV wonder in combination with an ATI 8500DV and the Soundblaster Audigy 2 NX external usb device. I guess I have all of the items that are not supposed to work with the HDTV wonder. I will find out tomorrow if my setup works or not. I will post my findings. On another note. Go Pack! I am a state Alum from 98 in Mech Engineering.

[sc5mu93]

also those of you who have it - i am interested in how it pulls in signals (with the included antenna).

i checked www.antennaweb.org and all the signals in my area are around 30 something miles away. this concerns me -as i cant errect a outdoor antenna. (i live in an apartment)

[doctj]

Is anyone running this card in a system with another tv tuner card already installed? I have a leadtek expert card that I'd like to keep in the system for analog/digital cable as it's mpeg 2 capture is better than ATI.

[ben6]

Originally Posted by sc5mu93

also those of you who have it - i am interested in how it pulls in signals (with the included antenna).

i checked www.antennaweb.org and all the signals in my area are around 30 something miles away. this concerns me -as i cant errect a outdoor antenna. (i live in an apartment)

Well, the antenna does the job for me. I found a new position that garners me something like 18 separate stations including all networks and most of the secondary stations (I'm missing one OTA station a Korean one which I can't understand anyway hehe)

My HDTV Wonder is in a room with one window and one door. The nearest broadcast tower is on a mountain over 10 miles away.

[Grimister]

I am around 35-50 miles from all my signal sources and i could only get 2 or 3 stations out of 12 until I purchased one of the cheap 12db signal amps and put inline now I get all 12 if pointed inthe right direction. The antenna that comes with the HDTV is directional

[grog]

The antenna worked fine on the main level of my house but I have my computers in the basement so I put the Zenith Silver Sensor outside. Works like a champ out-doors too. I did ground the incomming line to the cold water pipe just in case!



I get all the locals expect 46-1 "UPN" with the antenna placement I am using. UPN is not carrying and HDTV broadcasts worth talking about anyway, so no loss. All stations are solid, the ATI HDTV WONDER seems to be fine with anyting above 65%. Everything is rock solid!

2-1 FOX-2HD FOX [126°-6.6 miles - Signal 82%] - 1080i
4-1 KMOV CBS [114°-10.3 miles - Signal 71%] - 1080i
5-1 KSDK-DIGITAL NBC [102°-7.8 miles - 85%] - 1080i
9-1 KETC-HD PBS [152°-8.6 miles - 66%] - 720P
9-2 KETCKid PBS [152°-8.6 miles - 66%] - SD480i
9-3 KETC 9 PBS [152°-8.6 miles - 66%] - SD480i
11-1 WB11-DT. WB [99°-8.1 miles - 85%] - 1080i
30-1 ABC Digial 720P ABC [95°-7.8 miles - 85%] - 720P
46-1 WRBU UPN [183°-14.1 miles - 0%] - SD480i

Greg

Originally Posted by sc5mu93

also those of you who have it - i am interested in how it pulls in signals (with the included antenna).

i checked www.antennaweb.org and all the signals in my area are around 30 something miles away. this concerns me -as i cant errect a outdoor antenna. (i live in an apartment)

[grog]

Works fine with the Audigy in my system.

Greg

Originally Posted by xsvcd

MrEMan4k I am planning on using my HDTV wonder in combination with an ATI 8500DV and the Soundblaster Audigy 2 NX external usb device. I guess I have all of the items that are not supposed to work with the HDTV wonder. I will find out tomorrow if my setup works or not. I will post my findings. On another note. Go Pack! I am a state Alum from 98 in Mech Engineering.

[EMunEeE]

Originally Posted by grog

Works fine with the Audigy in my system.

Greg

Thanks! If all goes right I should be ordering mines from ATI next week................

[xsvcd]

Ok my HDTV wonder is set to be delivered today! I have an Athlon HTPC hooked up to my 50” via the component cables at 720p. Has anyone hooked the HDTV wonder up to a large High definition television? How does it look? Is it as good as cable High Definition?

I noticed that the Olympic coverage is 24 hours a day. Man that is going to eat up some hard drive if I record that! Does anyone know what bit rate the HDTV records at for 720p?

[grog]

This should help.



Raw text. You can see why I made it a jpeg.

Record time 1 minute.
MMC Analog TV verses MMC DTV.

SIZE FILE_TYPE HDTV? 2-Hour Movie
----------- --------- ----- ------------
342,926 56k Modem.wmv no 41.1MB
1,988,036 Cable_DSL_Modem.wmv no 0.23GB
5,528,218 LAN.wmv no 0.66GB
6,944,886 HandHeld.avi no 0.83GB
9,629,948 Portable.avi no 1.15GB
10,609,060 VCD-DEFAULT.mpg no 1.27GB
13,203,265 LocalUse.wmv no 1.58GB
17,857,616 SuperVideoCD.mpg no 2.14GB
23,180,984 HomeTheater.avi no 2.78GB
40,173,568 HDTV-480I.mpg yes 4.82GB
48,932,864 ATI-VCR-GOOD.vcr no 5.87GB
63,299,584 DVD-DEFAULT.mpg no 7.59GB
70,313,984 HDTV-720P.mpg yes 8.37GB
116,441,088 DVD-MAX.mpg no 13.97GB
140,185,600 HDTV-1080I.mpg yes 16.82GB



Greg

Originally Posted by xsvcd

Ok my HDTV wonder is set to be delivered today! I have an Athlon HTPC hooked up to my 50” via the component cables at 720p. Has anyone hooked the HDTV wonder up to a large High definition television? How does it look? Is it as good as cable High Definition?

I noticed that the Olympic coverage is 24 hours a day. Man that is going to eat up some hard drive if I record that! Does anyone know what bit rate the HDTV records at for 720p?

[dwellen]

I have been trying to use the Input adapter on the HDTV card and
there doesn't seem to be a way to access it. On the 9800pro, the
input connector works fine and is selectable through the analog
tv tuner. The dtv application doesn't have a way of selecting anything
but the tuner. I did have some trouble loading the drivers and was
finally able to track down all of the errors that were preventing the
drivers and applications from loading but I still may need to do a complete
unload and reload of the drivers in that the input connect issue and
the dvd application is missing.

Thanks
Dana

[ben6]

Hrm, if anyone is having issues with their MMC giving an error on autoscan try changing the position of the antenna a little. The HDTV Wonder seems to be quite sensitive to position.

Also, the antenna doesn't pull anywhere near 80+% gain on mine. But it gets the channels clear and relatively stutter free (if i don't kick the antenna)

[PGHammer]

Originally Posted by Shock-n-Awe

200 bucks is higher than i expected it to be.

i skimmed over the reviews,and wonder if anyone can answer this.

the pics show only an S-video out, wtf?

or will i be able to use the DVI to component dongle on my 9600, to get HD out to my TV?

i have cable now and i like it and im not going to drop it anytime soon,

im just asking this for people who might be in the market for an hdtv .
would they be able to skip over the set top box, and still get the same quality though component, while savng a few bucks?

or will s-video be the best they can get?

if the s-video is it, that sucks fat goats

If your cable company is using QAM256 to retransmit HD content (and most are) then the HDTV Wonder won't let you toss your cable box.

There are no YPbPr inputs on the HDTV Wonder, so it's basically OTA or nothing. (Satellite viewers are also SOL.)

*However*, you have dual antenna *inputs* so you can have both OTA HD and a feed from your satellite (or cable) company using the other antenna input.

Right now, there is *one* HDTV tuner that *claims* to support QAM256 (the myHD Fusion III); however, it is not widely available and still has software issues.

Even though I have cable (which I have no plans on tossing), the HDTV Wonder makes one heck of a case for itself with the dual-source cability (cable TV for one input, and the included HD antenna for the OTA HD content available locally). However, I do have some issues that need to be addressed.

1. I have an AIW 9700 Pro in the system. Because it's my primary graphics card, I have no plans on getting rid of it until I upgrade to PCI Express. Can two sets of ATI TV tuners coexist?

2. If the audio output is fed through my Audigy 2 ZS, will the Audigy detect the Dolby Digital content (if any) in the HD signal?

3. What IRQs does the HDTV Wonder use? (This is strictly informational, as I am wondering about ACPI compatibility.)

[PGHammer]

Originally Posted by HDTVGuru

Wrong.
But close.

First, HDTV is really a consumer electronics term. Your PC display is really "Super-HDTV" capable already. A resolution of 1600x1200 at 95hz is attainable by most current video cards and monitors (LCDs are usually 1280x1024 until they are bigger than 19"), and even just 1280x1024 essentially matches 1080 resolution, exceeding it in refresh rate because your PC is not interlaced, but rather progressive scan. 1280x1024 60hz on a PC pretty much matches 1080p, and only a few 1080p HDTVs are even available. 1280x1024 at 95hz can thus easily display 1080i or 1080p.
Set your PC at 1600x1200 95hz and your display is well beyond the best HDTV content available. And your video card may even have a choice of resolutions like 1280x1080 to match the HDTV line count. If not, applications like Powerchute can create custom resolutions.

Then, of course, is the necessity to get HDTV content in its raw TS format into the PC in the first place. Even most DVDs are only 480i/p or 720i/p at best, so even 1024x768 resolution exceeds the DVD resolution and the DVD must be upscaled to fill the screen. (simplified, as there are various 4:3 vs. 16:9 proportioning issues)

And not all HDTV broadcasters send 1080i. Some send 720i/p. And some send 16:9 while others send 4:3. While your Digital STB can tune all these, there is no guarantee that this is what is sent to the television, as that relies on the outputs available on the STB and the inputs available on the TV and ultimately, the interoperability and compatability of both together.

Pretty complicated to figure out the best way to fill a TV screen proportionally while simultaneously scaling the picture to match the best resolution of the display.

And like Laptops, non-CRT HDTVs (LCD, DLP, Plasma) have a defined resolution based upon the exact number of pixels on the screen in rows and columns, so you always want to have the TV working at that optimum resolution, scaling the data to fit.

With CRTs, it's much easier to smoothly display various resolutions, as while one may be called "optimum", the display of others is not so detrimental to the appearance. This is why your CRT Monitor looks smooth from 640x480 all the way to its maximum while a 1280x1024 LCD looks blocky at any reduced resolution.

So, as long as you have a good video card and monitor (LCD or CRT) of at least 1280x1024, your PC can display HDTV quite well so long as you have the appropriate playback app.

Now, if you use your PC to supply the signal to a HDTV, your video card needs to be able to output a resolution and refresh the TV can accomodate. If by Svideo, Composite or even VGA, it's an analog signal and while VGA may exceed the digital source resolution, it is not Digital HDTV, it is digital transcoded to analog and upscaled to fill the screen.
If your video card has a DVI-Out port, it is sending a digital signal to the HDTV. Obviously, this is preferable, but it still requires that your video card output a signal that is compatible with what the HDTV can accept.

Set Top Boxes (STBs) also vary in how they connect to the HDTV. Recall that no matter how you slice it, Composite and SVideo are analog signals. DVI and FireWire are digital.

According to the reviews, the dongle connection on HDTVWonder supports just SVideo and Composite, so there is no reason to input your STB Output into the HDTV Wonder if you have any other SVideo or Composite input like on a regular TV Capture or multimedia video card like an ATI.

Basically, what comes out of your STB isn't HDTV any more...it's analog (Unless you output digital video on FireWire).

So if you have digital cable or Dish/DTV already, there is no reason to get a HDTV Wonder as all it will do for $200 + antenna is tune the local OTA HDTV channels you already get on Cable/Sat. That's a pretty expensive capture card.

There is no need to "tune" on the PC like you do when you set a TV on Ch3 or Ch4 and tune with the VCR, thus the tuning features of the HDTVWonder are redundant.

What you need is simply video-in on the PC which can be obtained for $40 with a simple capture card or an integrated solution like an AIW.

Cable in wall
Digital CATV STB
-firewire out to PC firewire delivers digital signal
-Composite or SVideo out to PC Composite or SVideo in delivers Analog TV

Now when the HDTV card makers create Digital Cable Ready HDTV Tuners, you will plug the cable from the wall straight to the PC and let the card replace the STB. Just like you can do with analog TV and a tuner card or AIW right now.
At this point, it will also be necessary to have some sort of device that allows the descrambling of encrypted Digital channels, which for new DCReady televisions is called CableCARD (by Cable Labs, though individual manufacturers or cable companies may have their own brand name for the technology)

Make sense?

It's confusing...don't be embarassed. Too many of the terms being used are ambiguous or have multiple meanings depending upon how they are used and what equipment is being referred to.

The hardest thing is bridging the concept between the worlds of computers and consumer electronics.

And finally, the best results are obtained by using the most capable equipment to keep the signal in its original Digital format as long as possible, minimizing A-D and D-A conversions or any scaling of the data.

Fun, huh?

True.

However, with LCD PC displays in the mix, the resolution support is different.

While most 17" CRTs can support 720p easily, the same size LCD is usually limited to 1024x768, and thus will trip up displaying a 720P image (16:9) due to lack of height.

At 19 inches, the LCD catches up, albeit only with HD images (it reaches 720p because the native resolution is usually 1280x1024). The CRT has a native resolution of 1600x1200 at this screen size; however, it falls short of the resolution requirements for 1080i.

Moving to 21-23 inches (the ceiling screen size for typical desktop CRTs) widescreen 1080i is now on the table (1920x1080). We have also reached the typical graphics ceiling for analog display adapters (1920x1440). 21-inch LCDs are rare air here; most LCDs at sizes near this are bigger (such as Samsung's line of SyncMaster LCD-Ts beginning with the widescreen-format SyncMaster 240T). However, LCDs are still more expensive than CRTs (even though 24-inch CRTs are also uncommon) due to product age. Also, widescreen plasma displays start to appear; however, they are even more expensive than LCD displays. Worse, few plasma displays are outfitted for computer usage.

480p comtent is usually sent at standard (4:3) resolution. However, DVD content usually uses letterboxed/widescreen formatting (16:9).

720p is almost always 16:9. 720p DVDs also exist; however, they are almost always encoded using Windows Media's new High Definition Encoders, and are primarily designed for PC playback (good news for your PC, however).

1080i is the Promised Land of HDTV; like 720p, it is pretty much all 16:9. This is the preferred format of NBC, CBS, and most satellite and cable HD providers. If you have a 17-inch CRT display and one or more of your local stations broadcasts in 1080i, it's display upgrade time (to 21 inches *at minimum*).

[PGHammer]

Originally Posted by jgs9455

This is a great discovery!! People have been quick to bash this card - and it's hardly out yet. Look how long people have been playing with different versions of the MyHD and Fusion cards. Those cards have had many hardware and software revisions and still have issues. I'm not saying the HDTV Wonder is perfect, but it can only get better.

Any new HDTV cards on the scene could be good for all of us. When others start to notice that ATi's cards/software use 20% of resourses, while WinMediaPlayer9 & WinDVD uses >90% - we win. Why? Because maybe they will improve their stuff now that someone else has done it better. Example -
I remember having to originally install a Hollywood Magic Plus mpeg2 card just to watch DVDs some years ago. Now (along with faster processors) computers better support DVDs - with software and graphics cards that can handle mpeg decoding.

I not only remember the RealMAGIC Plus, I bought one (with my first DVD-ROM drive) the Pioneer DVR-A04S (the 4x *DVD sucker*). It still works; however, the AIW Radeon 8500DV turned it into shelfware.

What ATI did is take the red-headed stepchild of MMC (File Player) and sent it to NIP/TUCK for some surgery. Goodbye, ugly duckling; hello, beautiful swan!

To kick the butt of Windows Media Player, on Microsoft's own OS, is nothing less than astounding. This is a definite wake-up call to all those vendors of third-party apps that compete with stuff included with Windows (yes you *can* build a better mousetrap!)

[Sulik]

Most likely, the performance differences are due to which MPEG decoder is used.
The best way to compare decoders is to use the MS graphedit utility and render HD MPEG file (or HD VCR file).

In auto-render, it will use the default decoder on the system (if it's Ligos or Mainconcept, you're screwed). You can then try explicitely inserting a MPEG decoder such as:
- Cyberlink DTV Video Decoder
- ATI MPEG Video Decoder
- Intervideo Video Decoder
In each case, play the file and look at the cpu usage. You'll also see if the decoder is using hw acceleration through the media type betwen the decoder and renderer (should say DXVA for video acceleration).