ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0

December 13th, 2004

Pros: Little lag; many recording options; excellent EPG; TV magazine; clean interface; durable; well-priced.
Cons: Buggy and sensitive to video cards; no DVD burning (?); high CPU usage; not visual appealing; no remote control.
Verdict: Assuming your computer is fast enough and the Multimedia Center has no quarrels with your video cards like ours, the image quality and software features alone make the ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 worth the $99.

The TV Wonder USB 2.0 can be summed up with the prose, "Ugly is only skin deep". While the tuner's housing is very unattractive, the image quality and features that you never thought you would use make up for the appearance very quickly considering the inexpensive price.

Package Content
- TV Wonder USB 2.0
- USB 2.0 cable
- AC Power adaptor
- Setup CD with manual
- ATI Multimedia Center software (9.02)
- GUIDE Plus

System Requirements
- Intel Pentium 4, Celeron, AMD Athlon or compatible
- 128MB of system memory (256MB recommended)
- Available USB 2.0 port required
- Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
- Sound card and speakers
- Cable TV signal or amplified antenna
- Interactive Program Guide requires internet connection for listing updates
- Windows XP, Windows 2000
- Compatible with graphics sub-systems supporting Microsoft DirectX overlay.

First Impressions
Seeing as how the TV Wonder USB 2.0 was clearly designed with portability in mind, that is what we shall focus on. The tuner itself is very lightweight and compact, yet rugged enough to withstand the pressure induced by a backpack full of Cisco textbooks. In fact, it even withstood over 120lbs of weight placed on it. Unfortunately the design had a few imperfections. For one it is by no means visually appealing, with only two shades of grey clashed with by the bright red ATI logo in the center. An LED sits right above the logo indicating when the device has power. The placement of the various ports is somewhat random, with wires coming out on three ends thus eliminating most hope for cable management.

Cable-wise, ATI packed this one barebones. There's a 3' USB cable and a 6' AC adaptor that has a removable plug for traveling abroad although no replacement plugs were included. Any coaxial, S-Video or RCA cables going to be used we had to provide for ourselves.

Quick Installation
Installation of the TV Wonder USB 2.0 was fairly easy with only a few minor troubles. Upon inserting CD, we were greeted by a launcher to access the installer, manuals, and product information. After clicking install we were presented with two options: an express setup option that installs all the separate software components in an automated process, or manual installation of select components.

However, when you go through either installer it should be noted that the DVD Player component of Multimedia Center would not install, even when explicitly selected in manual. Additionally on both test machines of a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 when using a Radeon 7500LE card, "ATI Bar" wouldn't be detected and AuthorScript wouldn't install as documented in ATI's knowledge base. Even on the two systems with NVIDIA cards that didn't provoke the AuthorScript error, the media layout button in the Library would not appear, thus removing DVD burning functionality. Nonetheless, neither of these two bugs interfered with watching TV, so let's move on.

After the software has been installed and the tuner has been connected, we proceeded through a TV set-up wizard that automatically tuned the channels, and then gave options to enable parental controls, the default recording format, drive usage, and performance settings to help ease the load on the CPU and hard drive, at the expense of image quality.

Clean Interface
Unlike the tuner, the interfaces for the different Multimedia Center (MMC) components are smooth and tightly integrated with each other. The LaunchPad for example provides 1-click access to all of the installed MMC components. Optionally launched at startup, it can dock to the sides of the screen or act as a standard window. Through here you can also control skins for each of the installed components including the LaunchPad itself, although a restart of that component is required before the new skin appears. While downloading additional skins is not currently possible, the majority of the provided ones are well thought out, as there are enough buttons to control most of the TV features, while moving the mouse over certain buttons will change the pointer to indicate that right-clicking will provide additional options related to that feature. Each of the skins is available in every individual component, allowing for a standardized interface.

One Display Fits All

While Multimedia Center installs many components such as a CD and VCD player, for the purpose of this review we shall focus solely upon the features that integrate with watching television. The PVR software or TV component of the MMC has more features than pizzas that go through a LAN party, and is arguably one of the best PVRs we have tested.

The Video Window itself is packed with features. When changing a channel, a small info box will appear on the top of the video with the channel number, name, program, and display whether the audio is mono, stereo, or SAP. Click-dragging a box within the window will zoom in on the boxed area so you can read those Easter eggs or fine print, and another click-drag will pan the zoomed area. The aspect ratio can be either fixed to the standard 4:3 ratio, or configured to use multiple widescreen and letterbox ratios. It can also be left unfixed, allowing for resizing of the window to nearly any dimension. Multiple keyboard shortcuts exist for switching in between preset display sizes (including full screen) and aspect ratios.

For cluttered desktops, the video window can be even further customized to hide the frame, set as the active desktop, or when used with an ATI video card placed in a "Thru-Video" transparent desktop or window that is displayed above all other applications. For Internet Explorer users, ATI installs the ATI TV Explorer Bar, which opens a thumbnail TV window on the left side of the explorer window with scrolling program listings underneath it. Now if only that was a Firefox extension...

Master the Sands of Time
There are two modes within the TV component: live and "TV-on-Demand", ATI's name for time-shifting. Both have their own strengths and weaknesses, such as changing the aspect ratio and recording can only be done in live mode, while pausing live television can obviously only be done in the more CPU-intensive TV-on-Demand mode. When in TV-on-Demand mode, a progress bar and jog shuttle will appear within the controller for quickly fast forwarding and rewinding the current place in the buffer. When in the past, you can alter the playback speed to play normally, slower, or faster than real-time and also pop up a second window to display what's live. After about a minute of time-shifting, a clipboard icon will become active on the controller that can permanently save the time buffer to the hard drive.



It should be noted that these two modes are sensitive to the video card you may be using. For example, on our test cards of a Chaintech GeForce FX 5900 XT and a Gainward GeForce 3 Ti 200, the video would jitter in live mode, again documented in ATI's knowledge base. The Picture-In-Picture corner of the Electronic Program Guide or Explorer bar would add noise to the picture if not block it out completely. Even worse, when paused or anywhere in the past while time-shifting, the 5900 would scramble the video entirely. None of these bugs were encountered with the Radeon 7500LE test card.

What's on?
ATI has mastered two important features in this day and age when you literally have over 70 channels to choose from - the program listings and channel surfing. The Electronic Program Guide (EPG) is Gemstar's Guide Plus+, and without a doubt the best EPG for a TV tuner we have seen so far. While other tuners would rely on Internet Explorer and TitanTV's EPG service, ATI's solution is far better because no browser is required whatsoever. Launching the EPG from either the LaunchPad or TV controller would bring us to a quick registration form for our email (no, it hasn't been spammed yet) and zip code, and if we were using either a terrestrial or cable signal. Upon completion it would automatically download the listings for the next week, along with a crossword puzzle and some advertisements. One heavily underappreciated thing saves lots of time is that after listings have initially been downloaded, the channel names will automatically be updated within the TV component, eliminating the need to manually name all the channels.

When actually in the EPG, the video will automatically resize itself to appear in the upper left corner, above the two downloaded ads for ATI's graphics cards. The rest of the screen shows what the various stations are displaying for the next few hours, and right above the listings are different search options for finding whatever suits your interest.



Besides just viewing by time, you can view by the title of the show, the actors appearing in it, or by genre, as well as see all the movies or sports games that will take place that day, again sorted by genre or sport. Once a program has been found, clicking it will display the channel within the preview corner, and double clicking will display a detailed description of the program along with additional air dates it will be shown. Right-clicking a program also enables you to add that program to the scheduler to be recorded at a specified quality.

There's also a channel surfing feature within live mode that flips through all the channels sequentially generating thumbnail previews that can be scrolled through. The TV Wonder USB 2.0 generates the thumbnails quicker than any other TV tuner we have reviewed so far, at a rate of about 3 channels per second. Clicking on a thumbnail will preview the channel for a customizable amount of seconds, while double clicking it will exit channel surfing and automatically go to that channel.



The TV Wonder USB 2.0 includes V-Chip capabilities for parental control, however they are very weak. While selectable ratings range from TV-Y to TV-MA, no ratings can be specified for some movies, and there is no option to block or allow NR non-rated programming.

Droolworthy Recording
We were all amazed at how many different ways there are to record the same program. Apart from the standard recording based on a schedule or one-touch recording found in all PVRs, the TV Wonder USB 2.0 can automatically time lapse record a specified number of frames per minute / hour / day, or by manually clicking. There's also a motion-triggered recording feature that is particularly useful in home surveillance setups or when watching a shopping network. When a selected area of the screen has movement beyond a certain threshold, recording will begin either normally or in time-lapse for a set amount of time.

Closed-captioning plays an important role in recording as well, where specifying "hot words", phrases or words that appear in the closed captioning can alert you that your favorite team was just mentioned on ESPN, or just start recording.

Hot words can also trigger an interesting form of recording called "TV Magazine". This HTML format as shown below will record all the closed captioning for a set duration, accompanied by screen captures that line the left and right side of the paragraphs.



Because the TV Wonder USB 2.0 transfers uncompressed video to the computer, all compression must take place on the CPU. While this allows for a variety of codecs to be used including DivX, it can be very processor intensive depending on the codec selected, so make sure you have a fast computer of at least a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 or an Athlon XP 2400+. ATI included many codecs for recording, including the ATI's VCR format, Windows Media, and the MPEG-2 format used for DVD authoring, a nice touch. For newbies who don't know much about compression, ATI has mapped many codecs and bit-rates to user-friendly settings such as "DVD" and "56k", although pro users can tweak everything to their own liking. One last setting that can either help or hurt the video being recorded is ATI's "Video Soap", which can soften noise picked up by terrestrial signals or cable television that has been split too many times.

All of the video components within the MMC have a screen capture utility. Just clicking the screen capture button can perform a number of actions, such as automatically inputting the image into the Stills Gallery, saving to disk, copying to the clipboard, automatically sending the picture to the printer. Within the gallery you can do all of the above, as well as set an image as the wallpaper. When saving an image to disk, there are plenty of formats to choose from such as JPEG, PCX, TIF, BMP, and TGA. One thing that we would have liked to see ATI include within the gallery is a way to automatically include an image as an email attachment.

Performance
One of our most popular questions is "Can I play games on this?" The answer in this case is yes, yes you can. Traditionally, because most TV tuners introduce about two seconds of lag into the stream, the only reason to hook up an Xbox, PS2 or any other console would be to record the action to post on the web, and even then splitting the video to an actual television would be required to maintain responsive timing.

Things have changed with the TV Wonder USB 2.0, which has about less than half a second of lag. While still not ideal for the most intense gaming situations, the lag is light enough that mowing down the Covenant in Halo 2, dropping off passengers in Crazy Taxi, and owning your opponent in Super Smash Brothers is indeed possible after a minute or two of adjustment to get the timing down, although your mileage may vary. RPG games like Final Fantasy run smooth as silk.

For setups with lots of USB devices or a lack of USB bandwidth (excluding straight USB 1.1), the transfer settings can be tweaked between the tuner and the computer, using either normal or reduced bandwidth, and either ISOC (Isochronous) or BULK modes can be set to determine how nice the TV Wonder USB 2.0 plays with your other devices by how it shares the bandwidth.

CPU performance was uncomfortably high using default settings, using 10-23% of the CPU when in live mode on our 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM. In TV-On-Demand mode using ATI's VCR format, this figure would jump as expected, ranging from 40-72%, or 51-72% with stereo audio. When paused, CPU usage would drop as low as 33%. Not really an issue as it can be easily ignored, but for some reason when using the TV component with SATA drives, a warning message would pop up at startup claiming that DMA transfer mode is not enabled, even when it is in both the BIOS and Windows settings.

Video quality was unsurpassed for an external tuner, thanks mostly in part to the tuner's Theater 200 chip. Color reproduction held true, lines and text were crisp, and moving images and text did blur.

Is It Worth It?
Assuming your computer is fast enough and the Multimedia Center has no quarrels with your video cards like ours, yes! The numerous recording options coupled with the image quality alone make this tuner worth the $99, although DVD burning would have been nice - we're still not sure if it's included or just broken. For gamers, this is probably the best choice when considering the lag, or lack of it rather.

- R. Scott Clark, Consumer Technology Editor

Where to buy ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0?


User Review(s)

"Install Hangs" Tried to install on a brand new Presario (Athlon XP 3200+ with XP SP2), with a brand new GeForce AGP 8x card, and install just hangs. I even let it run overnight. I uninstalled my virus scanner, downloaded the latest install from ATI, all to no avail. Freakin frustrating. Hours on this, and now I've got to see if the store will trade it for a competing brand. I spent 8+ years in OS QA, so I know I've tried everything remotely helpful. From Todd, January 26, 2005

"Great way to put TV on PC" The ATI Wonder USB 2 has allowed me to keep up with the news and my favourite programs while doing some freelance writing. No trouble installing on my desktop, but will not accept the USB 2 adapter on my older laptop (too little bandwidth). Some flicker, but acceptable recording of programming. I have digital cable, so most auto functions aren't available. I recommend this unit, especially given its price. And I'll get it working with my laptop ... you can't let gizmos win. From LeRoy Bidlo, January 23, 2005

"SWEEEEET!!!!!!" Trying to install it was hell. It does not like USB 2.0 PCI cards as it complain about not haing enought bandwidth You get higher bandwidth with the USB built on the motehrboard. The drivers that came with it did not work so I went to the ATI support site and downloaded the newer drivers from there. Ok so after a proper setup/install/configure it works like a champ! I love it! (ATI why you ship buggy drivers?) From Inachu, January 03, 2005

"Hardware OK, Software needs work." Using the ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 is like walking through a mine field, sometimes just one click and ... crash. When it works, it produces good quality video on the screen from a TV cable or other source. However trying to use some other options, like recording the video, replaying it, changing the screen size, etc, has all kinds of strange results like crashing the computer, changing the screen video display color map, and so on. Also on installation, it takes the default associations for all the video files in the computer. Why do they do that? From Roger Koch, December 16, 2004

We're currently upgrading our user review system; so we won't be accepting new reviews for now.

TV Wonder USB 2.0 Specs

Interface(s)	Hi-Speed USB
Released date	September 2004
Platforms	Windows 2000, Windows XP
Video capture resolution(s)	720 x 480, 352 x 480, 352 x 240
Video capture format(s)	MPEG-4, MPEG-2, MPEG-1
Max. capture rate @ 30fps	720 x 480
Video input(s)	Composite video, S-video, 75 Ohm coaxial
Audio input(s)	RCA left & right
Video output(s)	None
Audio output(s)	None
TV standards supported	NTSC
Personal video recorder?	Yes
Remote control	No
Software	GemstarGUIDE Plus+, Multimedia Center
Hardware encoder?	--
Power source	Self-powered
Warranty	Three years

Extras
Turn on and off this self-powered device automatically with your PC.
Lost a USB cable? Get a replacement USB cable.
Running out of USB ports? Get an extra USB hub.
You may need a new USB card to achieve Hi-Speed USB speeds.
Confirm with our USB 2.0 FAQ if you have Hi-Speed USB on your PC.