Digital Trends

ATI HDTV Wonder

October 17th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Installation and Setup

 

While installation of the HDTV Wonder is not particularly difficult, it is quite time consuming and can be frustrating at times. First, you'll need to make sure that you are in a good location to receive HDTV broadcasts. For best results, the antenna should be placed near a window and pointed towards the broadcast towers. This can be rather difficult to achieve, but one great resource we found while testing the product was http://www.antennaweb.org/, a website that helps you find HDTV broadcasts in your area and even gives you compass directions of the broadcast towers.

 

Physical installation of the HDTV tuner in your Windows XP system is as easy as any other PCI card. You'll need to hook up both the coax connector for the HDTV antenna and the coax connector for analog cable. Since the HDTV Wonder also includes ATI's input box, you'll need to plug that into the back of the card if you want to input analog video or audio for editing purposes.

 

While the hardware installation is fairly straightforward and simple, the software installation is quite time consuming. Since this is a new product and ATI often updates their drivers and software, you'll want to check their website to see if there are any newer versions than what shipped on your software CD. If your CD contains the latest drivers and software, installation will be much easier. The CD autoruns when you put it in your computer and prompts you to install the software. If the drivers on the CD are out of date, as was the case with our setup, you'll want to download the updated software from ATI's website. There are four separate files that need to be installed for the HDTV Wonder, and if you want to install the GUIDE Plus+ software, you'll need to install that from your CD. Unfortunately, ATI does not mention this in their documentation or on their website so you basically just have to know — or have had read this review. Installation of all this software does take quite a while and includes a few system reboots. Once installed, ATI's media launch bar runs on system startup and allows you one-click access to all of the HDTV Wonder's features. You can easily turn this autorun feature off and access the programs through your start menu. With the Remote Wonder installed, you can also use the remote to run, close, and control ATI's media programs. There is no default button for digital TV so you'll have to program that in one of the programmable buttons.

 

When you first run the Digital TV or Analog TV applications, you'll be prompted to set up your channels. The tuner will scan for channels and add them to the lineup. Digital stations broadcast station and programming information with the digital signal, so the HDTV Wonder should be able to name your channels and programs, and give you information relative to the program and the broadcast signal. We found that this didn't work all the time however, and several channels don't broadcast this information. For a true DTV schedule on your desktop, you'll need to refer to an online schedule like the one found at TitanTV.com. You'll have to manually name your analog cable channels because the HDTV Wonder can't do it for you. This can be quite time consuming and seems to be very inefficient, especially since you are inputting your zip code and GUIDE Plus+ knows the lineup. But as mentioned before, GUIDE Plus+ is not the best or most stable TV guide program we've seen. Our setup kept getting a TV listings error when trying to retrieve the data file and we were never able to get the listings correctly. After reading ATI's support FAQ and several forum posts on the internet, we realized we weren't alone.