VisionTek TV Wonder HD 650 PCI Express

Comment: The box says to get HD channels over cable. I have Cablevision in upstate NY. When I scan for channels the HD channels (7xx) are not found. I haven't called yet to try and resolve, but this is NOT what I expected, OR what it says it will do on the box! The software that came with it is less than stellar. It dies several minutes after I boot up.

Comment: This is the first tv tuner i had ordered. I am glad i went with this one. I have a eight bowtie anntena, and the tv stations are 100 miles from us. At first i hooked the tuner to a signal booster, and the picture was not coming in good. I then bypassed the booster and the picture was great. If you want a good Tuner then you can't go wrong with this one.

Comment: I'm using with with Vista Home Premium and Windows Media Center. It's just great! I love it so much (now that I've connected my pc to my flat screen) that I've disconnected my Direct TV service with TiVo. It does everything that a DVR does and the picture is great. I can get full screen on most channels over the air on my 42in and the picture quality is very good. It will record shows when I'm not home, I can use the remote to control it (most of the time anyway), and radio works pretty well to.

But the downside is that the included software from ATI does not work very well with my system, at least. It's very buggy and stalls often. I avoid using it all together. Also, I have not figured out how to get full use of the remote control to use it with MMC instead of ATI's software. Also, I had to use an amplified antenna to get a good solid signal, but I'm in a wooded area and signal will differ for each user.

Other than that, if you can find this card cheap (got mine for $40 at Best Buy!), it's well worth it. Very good hardware, questionable software.

Comment: This is a really nice tuner! I love how it has both digital (for certain cable channels and the new over-the air-channels - the ones that the whole digital TV transition is about) and analog (regular cable and the old over-the-air channels, even though they are all pretty much gone) TV tuners AND an FM radio tuner (although you can't use the analog TV tuner and FM radio tuner at the same time - they use the same input). It has hardware encoding, which means awesome quality - as good as analog gets and great for digital.

The only downsides are:

1. ATI (not VisionTek) has kind of bad software, and bundles a whole bunch of control utilities that no one really wants. I definitely recommend that you use Windows Media Center! If you do, be sure to only install the drivers to avoid the rest of the junk.

2. The only thing that Windows Media Center is bad about is that there is not presently support for digital cable, so if you want to use that you have to install the ATI software. The good news is that Windows 7 will include support for digital cable (at least the Beta does). I still for some reason have trouble getting Windows Media Center (in Windows 7 Beta) to find the digital channels, which is really annoying (but that is Microsoft and not VisionTek or ATI). Hopefully someday Windows Media Center will work with digital cable and this card!

Overall this card is great, but DO NOT BUY hoping to watch digital cable in Windows Media Center.

Comment: The Box: Dell 4700 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 D/HT [Dual Core/Hyper Thread] 2 gig DDR2 Ram, 512MB 8500GT NVidia 2 HD's 40G / 60G

The System: 1st XP Pro

#1 No Good - got infamous NMI Memory parity error - VisionTek number on box to call - didn't bother.
May be .NET Framework error - you need 1.1 not 2.0[?]


#2 The system XP MCE [Media Center edition]

Installed -Downloaded-Installed- Then installed card

OKAY - "near" HD quality with rooftop antenna - in both MCE and Catalyst Media Center

No complaints - I will be trying this in the intended problem child with 4gig of RAM [Abit IP-95 mobo]

Recorded clip - seems to be some image delays - have to do more testing
Other reviews complain of Programming Recording issues. Maybe the extra Ram or Recording to a separate physical drive will resolve the temp image freezes and delays - it may be whats shown with all really being recorded

Other than image reviews some other tech details posted would be more helpful.

=============
The above was a "Test" install - I just did a supposedly "Final" install - and I got the NMI Parity Error

Same Machine, Cards etc

Microsoft or ATI should get this together

As well as using .NET Framework 2.0 or 3.0 not 1.1 as XPMCE "needs" [?]