For many owners of the All-in-Wonder RADEON, it will be the video capture, TV-on-Demand and Guide Plus features that represent the product's most compelling advantages. In this part of our review, we'll look at these features.
Guide Plus, as noted in part 1, is like a computer-based TV Guide for your local viewing area that allows you to easily schedule recordings, watch shows and search for shows of interest. With it, you can record favorite shows directly to your hard drive and then later dump them to video tape or back them up on your choice of removable media, if desired. However, it all but requires an Internet connection (preferably a continuous connection, such as that provided by ADSL or a cable modem) for full functionality.
Without access to the Internet, you cannot, as far as we can tell, even use Guide Plus. This strikes us as an unnecessarily limitation to this feature. Even without the Guide Plus programme data, it would be useful to be able to program the All in Wonder RADEON to automatically record a show at a given time. Unfortunately, this is apparently not possible; instead, the "Grid" feature produces annoying error dialogs. And speaking of annoying errors, some owners of ATI products have noticed that their previously working Guide Plus features recently began failing. It seems the company changed Servers without telling anyone. A Rage3D.com forum thread discusses the issue and presents a registry hack that fixes the problem.
Unfortunately, a feature previously supported by Windows 98 called WaveTop, that downloaded programme information during the vertical blank interval in the video signal itself (and thus arriving through the cable or TV antenna without the need for an Internet connection) is no longer available, as the service has been discontinued.
We tested the "TV on Demand" feature on a number of PC systems, and configured it to record at each of its default quality settings. In every case, there was a plainly visible difference in quality between the "live TV" and the recorded version. Also, on a Pentium II/266 system, playback performance was occasionally interrupted by delays and other glitches. On 450 MHz or faster systems, we did not experience these delays.
You'll need quite a lot of disk space to take full advantage of the TV-on-demand feature. On one of our test systems, a drive with a gigabyte of free disk space yielded less than a minute of TV-on-demand recording at the highest quality setting. At the lowest quality setting, we were able to store a mere 17 minutes of video, and at the quality we considered the best trade-off between efficiency and quality, we managed just 4 minutes of recording. The system's video capture requirements are similar.
Some owners of ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon, Radeon VIVO, and Radeon with TV Wonder have experienced problems getting the TV-on-demand and/or video capture features to work reliably. We've seen numerous reports of machines where the Live TV output feature worked perfectly, but, after updating drivers, the timeshifted output became 200% taller and cut off halfway. Some users find that their TV-on-demand features are broken -- in some cases, seemingly irreparably -- after updating the Radeon drivers from those originally shipped with the product. (Installing Microsoft's WebTV feature sometimes helps.) Others find their ATI applications uncommonly prone to freezing or locking up their computer. The 4.0 version of the DVD player for Windows 2000, for example not only locked up, but completely froze Windows 2000 in our tests. Indeed, judging by the number of letters we get on the subject, it appears that almost everyone who has a TV Wonder experiences problems with that product. As chronicled in Firing Squad's History of ATI, buggy drivers are often a weak link in ATI's products.
The MMC 7.1 and 7075 series drivers seem to be the most successful combination for Windows 9x/Me (the Microsoft DV update to DirectX8 is typically required to solve "tvds.dll" errors); the beta 3124 driver dated April 1, 2001 or newer releases finally addressed this long-standing issue in Windows 2000. Most Windows 98/Me users report the best results by installing MMC 7.0 and then updating to 7.1, after installing DirectX8.0 and its digital video update.
Those experiencing problems trying to capture video, display TV or timeshift broadcasts might find that the beta (WDM) version of ShowShifter yields better time shifting capabilities than the Radeon. ATI TV Wonder owners will find this tool particularly useful: it adds timeshifting features ATI left out of that product! It also works with many other brands of TV cards. It's at http://www.showshifter.com
How Long Will It Take?
We initially reviewed this card back in November 2000, found it too buggy and put it back in the box for five months before reinstalling it for another round of tests with the latest drivers. After all that time, we still encountered serious bugs that prevented some tests, such as MadOnion.com's 3DMark 2001 from even running. Thus, we are delighted to note the release (well, sort of) of a leaked version of the ATi Radeon Beta 4.13.7097 Win9x & WinME Driver.
According to the release notes, dated Mar. 23, 2001:
The hardware Transform & Lighting functions, however, are still hopelessly buggy. The 3DMark 2001 demo sequence, with hardware T&L turned on, leaves out backgrounds, displays objects in incorrect locations and generally makes a mess of the display. It's easy to pin some of the blame on MadOnion for writing a demo that, at this point, seems to only work "correctly" on one manufacturer's cards (read:NVIDIA), however, the fact that the display accuracy improves dramatically on the Radeon when hardware T&L is disabled -- not to mention the fact that the 7097 driver once again broke the TV-on-demand feature (leading to the hasty release of yet another unsupported beta) -- points the finger right back where it belongs: at ATI.
Such long-standing bugs beg the question: why the heck can't ATI's programmers get their acts together? Our three-year-old Rage Fury card (based on the Rage 128 chipset) is now effectively obsolete, and the company has never released a completely trouble-free driver for that card. We usually recommend avoiding version 1.0 of anything, but when version 4.x still doesn't work properly, there's something wrong. Okay, we feel better now -- end of editorial.
Mar. 2003 Update: ATI has released the All in Wonder VE, a low-cost (about US$105) PCI card based on the Radeon 7500. See our review of the 7500 elsewhere on this site for details on the chip technology and its limitations.
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