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The hardware installed easily and quickly, windows found and installed the driver perfectly. Windows Media Center had no problem with this device and the ATI software installed and worked well. My only problem was with the remote receiver that came with the card, after plugging it in the computer locked up at the manufacturers screen on initial power on. This was fixed by merely unplugging the receiver from the USB port, I could probably find a fix but I will never use that remote anyway.Im using Vista Home Premium on a Compaq Presario
Hoped for more features. So far, was plug and play and has been flawless in performance.
It wasn't clear whether it recognized the second (ATSC) tuner.However, I found the "Media Center TV Pack 2008" (which is not released by Microsoft to consumers): [.].After installing the TV Pack 2008 and the "PlayReadyPC", I did a Microsoft Update and it found the cumulative upgrade for TV Pack 2008 (I did not install any KB fixes).Now MC recognizes 2 tuners and allows me to choose NTSC and ATSC/QAM inputs. I bought this card on sale from a B&M store.System: Vista x64 / ASUS PQ5-Pro / Q9450 / 8G RAMSource: Cable with free (local) HD channels.1) Installation.Card runs into memory modules in 1st PCIE slot on my M/B. Went straight to ATI site to download latest driver which worked fine. There did not seem to be a TV guide.3) Media Center (Vista x64 + latest updates).MC only found the NTSC (analog) channels off of my cable. Viewing tuner does not work unless I restart the computer (and evidently it's not just my computer). "ATI High Def Audio Device" and "ATI Unified AVStream Driver" shown in Device Manager.
When I change channels, it shows the channel number (i.e., 8-1 or 5), the channel name, and the show (from the guide).Now that I have Vista Media Center working, I am quite satisfied with the card and the video quality. Have several slots available so that was no problem for me. Seems to run fine, but I haven't tried recording yet. I also installed the ATI Catalyst Media Center from the CD, but am not too fond of the application. I used a splitter to connect my cable to both tuners (NTSC and ATSC).2) ATI Catalyst Media Center.Just a clunky interface, but it found the free HD channels on my cable. There are really limited instructions with this card, for some reason.Edit:* TV Pack link removed above, but Google is your friend.* Issue with resume from standby.
That is fairly annoying.
It works very nicely with Windows Media Center in Windows 7 (32 bit - I haven't tried 64 bit). Unfortunately, if you're recording and you want to watch live TV, you must watch what's being recorded. I have 3 other digital (ATSC) tuners, and this one picked up more channels than the others (to be fair, this one also has the shortest cable run because it's closest to my splitter). I use an outdoor antenna to receive over the air broadcasts. I bought this card to put into a Windows 7 media center PC I was building. There are connectors on the card for which I have no idea of their purpose, and I can't find out. HD content takes about 7GB/hr.I was pleasantly surprised to see that I could use it to watch live TV from my media center PC through my AV receiver to my TV set. Just make sure you have a BIG hard drive if you plan to record much.
I'll continue to use that for live TV but it was nice to have the option of using this card. No problems there either.My primary purpose for the card is to record digital TV. The installation and set up were easy. I already had a separate ATSC tuner for my TV. I used WMC to set up the card. It's been very easy to set up recordings via WMC. I purposefully flipped back and forth between this card and my other ATSC tuner on the same TV, and I couldn't tell a difference in picture or sound quality.My only complaint, and it's a minor one, is the lack of documentation in the box and online. Hope they're not important :-) Obviously they're not because it's working fine, but I would think ATI would take the time to actually document all of the features of their card.
The card even comes with a remote which for the most part controls WMC.My only negative is not really about the card but the native WTC files WMC stores and trying to get them to stream to my PS3.Great buy. These are in high def and the picture was FANTASTIC.
I really did not want to spend more for TV tuner card. Installation was an issue initally.
Recently there was a sale at a B&M store and was able to pick this up for thirty bucks. I then downloaded the TV Pack 2008 for windows and was able to get QAM uncrypted channels from the cable.
I wish I had just followed the forum advice at another site - wasted 2 hours trying to get this to work with the supplied CD. Finally just went to ATI's web site and downloaded the newest driver for the card and used windows media center (WMC) worked well for SD tuning.
In conjunction with WMC and downloading the electronic program guide this was easy to record TV and watch later - really Microsoft WMC is the great partner. Would recommend.
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