MCE TV Tuner Roundup: Featuring ATI's Theater 550 & NVIDIA's NVTV
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 12, 2005 6:26 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
First Place: ATI TV Wonder Elite
For just about a year now, we've been hearing about ATI's Theater 550 chip, the successor to the highly successful Theater 200 used in the eHome Wonder. The Theater 550 was a bit of a let down in that it seemed a lot like a new release of old technology. What we wanted to see was a hardware MPEG-4 encoder from ATI and what we got instead was the promise of the best hardware MPEG-2 encoder ever. Although it's not the promise we wanted, ATI did deliver exactly what they set out to do.
The most noticeable feature of the TV Wonder Elite was that all of the text box issues, which we saw in the competing cards, were gone.
A clean picture and note that there are no issues around the text boxes.
You can't get totally sharp text off of a SD signal, but you get text that's very legible and artifact-free with the TV Wonder Elite.
Upon closer investigation, the image quality of the TV Wonder Elite is better in many little ways compared to the competition here. The color reproduction is much more true. There are much lower levels of noise and you can even see detail in actors on the screen. Compared to the second place Hauppauge card, the differences are much more subtle, but in back-to-back comparisons, you do notice differences between the two cards. The Hauppauge does appear to have higher levels of color saturation, but the TV Wonder Elite seems to produce a more "correct" image.
ATI TV Wonder Elite
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250
Ignoring the differences in border colors (the video feed in the center is still the same), the TV Wonder Elite offers more accurate color reproduction.
As slight as those differences may be, given the price parity between the Hauppauge and the TV Wonder Elite, we give the nod to ATI here.
What the TV Wonder Elite doesn't do, however, is the type of improvement in image quality that ATI's marketing material would have you believe; the biggest reason being that SD cable signals are simply not good enough for those types of improvements to be seen. The TV Wonder Elite isn't perfect, while it is still susceptible to the quality of your cable feed, but out of the competitors here, it's as good as it gets.
ATI's Remote Wonder Plus (left) vs. a standard MCE remote (right)
The retail TV Wonder Elite ships with ATI's new Remote Wonder Plus, a much improved remote control design over previous ATI remotes. Unfortunately, the Remote Wonder Plus will not function as a MCE remote. You'll still have to shell out the $30 for one of those if you're building a MCE machine.
Although we have specifically decided not to focus on software bundles (given that the premise of this roundup is finding a TV tuner card for a MCE system), ATI does ship the TV Wonder Elite with a copy of CyberLink's PowerCinema with an ATI skin. At first glance, the ATI Edition of PowerCinema looks a lot like a red version of the MCE interface. However, as soon as you start to use it, you realize its shortcomings. The interface is extremely slow to respond compared to MCE and it still features no integrated program guide, which renders it useless as a serious PVR tool by today's standards. As a standalone TV tuner, the TV Wonder Elite's bundle leaves much to be desired, but as a companion to Windows XP Media Center Edition, ATI has released the best quality tuner on the market from what we've seen.
The biggest drawback of ATI's TV Wonder Elite is its price point - between $140 and $160, the TV Wonder Elite is ridiculously expensive for a SD TV tuner. But if you want the best, it's your only option.
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office boy - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Interesting that the NVTV card here got the worst review and over at tech report got the best.I wonder if it has something to do with one being a dual tuner and the other well not.
Yeah bummer to not see the 150mce (and it's been in stock everywhere for a while, it's not in stock at newewgg cus they keep selling out, try amazon or buy.com)
Also I have to question the reasoning behind using actual cable TV for testing. The quality can vary so much, and we of course can have no expectation of what type of quality could be coming from your cable signal vs ours.
Use of some type of modulator to create a catv signal or a game system (like TR did) would seem to be a better choice to me, plus you could test with testing patterns.
dgkulzer - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Oh, I would also go to the following website if you have a hauppauge card: http://www.shspvr.com/This site has more current drivers for the Hauppauge cards, plus a pretty good forum with useful info. If you get the 'beta lite' cd packages for your card you get a easy to install driver package.
dgkulzer - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
#48 I don't have digital cable but my understanding is that they can. The one thing you will need however is this: http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/cPath/38...and thats needed so you can change channels with the cable box.
I have a pvr-350 with gb-pvr and I couldnt be more happy with it :)
cer1 - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Ok, I admit I'm a total noob when it comes to TV tuner cards. I've been looking at them for awhile, but can't get my ahead around what they can and can not do with regards to the signal source. I'm always a bit disappointed when TV Tuner reviews don't exactly describe the video source used for the tests (analog cable, digital cable, aerial, cable company, etc.).My impression, which in all probability is wrong, is that these cards require an analog source and that they can not be hooked up to a digital cable source (such as I have from Comcast). Is this true, or can these cards be used with a digital cable signal?
ShadowVlican - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
i agree with the posts that 150MCE should've been included... great price/performance ratio for that cardto the freak that said 150MCE isn't widely available.. ur a dumbass! i can even buy one RIGHT NOW in freakin CANADA...
so yea Anand, ok review, but it needs 150MCE badly
glennpratt - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
I swear no matter who reviews these cards, the results are always completely different. Some people find the NVTV cards to be terrible while other sites give em editors choice and the forums have equal amounts of hate and love for all the cards. Ugh, I'm ready for cablecards, I don't want to think about analog and IR blasters ever again... Cmon 2007!jamawass - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Volunteer website? Do you know this site was valued at $100 million at one time? This is a business dude. BTW What happened to part 2 of the Myth TV review?WooDaddy - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Just to let everyone know, the eMuzed Maui has NO third-party support other than MCE. I had one and couldn't get it to work with any other app out there including sage and snapstream stuff. I ended up picking up a Prolink TV7000 instead. Compatible with the Hauppauge PVR250. Works flawlessly, but difficult to find.DigitalWarrior - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
#36 (GoatMonkey) - For software to review, don't forget SageTV! This is superb PVR software.Good warning #28 (Kishkumen). A lot of 3rd party PVR software doesn't have support for ATI cards.
airfoil - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
The PVR 150 should have been included in this review - it seems like the best tuner out there for MCE. I suspect the outcome would have been different if a '150 was tested instead of the 250.