ATI Technologies TV Wonder Pro PCI-NTSC (100-703138)

It works pretty well.

On the other hand the setup was a mess (I'm using Windows XP).

a) The CD that came with the hardware didn't have the same folder/directory structure as described in the manual. Had to browse and locate the XP drivers myself.
b) TV viewing and recording worked pretty well the first time, but the captured images had a totally green tint (red objects appeared black, so somehow "R" was missing from RGB signals). At first I thought the hardware was defective. Really freaked me out.
c) ATI.com had downloads for a newer version 8.8. I forgot to uninstall the CD's 8.2 first, and 8.8 didn't recognize 8.2 and got everything mixed up. Eventually had to uninstall both 8.2 and 8.8 and reinstall 8.8 (Urgh).

Anyway, after all this, it started working pretty well. Picture quality is decent. Video encoding works well on my humble P3 machine.

The software is not great but okay with me (I just want to watch TV and occasionally record and capture stuff so...Read more

I was kind of worried when I read reviews on how this didn't work with video cards other than ATI. (I have an 128MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, which is a fairly common card.) I recieved this TV-Wonder card as a gift, so I was about ready to ask to return it without even trying it. However, I decided it wouldn't hurt to try it out since they still returned opened defective hardware.

And low-and-behold, it worked! Despite building my own computers, and feeling that directions were below me, I followed them carefully as to not ruin the experiment. I probably would have done a few directions out of order, so that was a good idea.

In the end, I suppose people still have problems with it, probably with different video cards. All I can say is, it works with the Nvidia FX5200 card I mentioned above, and to follow the directions, carefully and treat the card like a holy grail while taking it out of the box.

At first I was worried about this product due to the reviews it recieved. In my experience with the card thoguh, I have actually found it's preformance excellent. First off, people complain of the quality of the image. This is called a cable signal, you can't expect your computer to magically make it better. If you ask why it doesn't look so bad on your TV, there's a simple answer, go sit right next to your TV and tell me how it looks. In the room my computer is in, I have a comfortable seat about 8 feet from the computer screen. The image looks perfect in full screen from there.

The second problem that people stated with this card is that there is an audio sync issue. This is very easy to solve, it's all in the setup of the computer. This is not an ATi problem, but rather a windows problem. When the cord is plugged from the back of your TV card and into your sound card, it goes in the microphone jack. Here is where most people have the problem. To process the cable...Read more