ExtremeTech Rescinds Rating for ATI's HDTV "Blunder"

[Gregg Lengling]

By ExtremeTech Staff  
 
 
 
Our June review of ATI's HDTV Wonder add-in card, designed to allow viewing, pausing and recording over-the-air HDTV signals was cautiously positive. We called the overall product a "solid offering," and despite a top 10 list of improvements needed, our final judgment was that this product was a "good first generation OTA HDTV offering."

With Dish Network and DirecTV and TiVo's HDTV DVRs costing a $1,000, we saw the $200 add-in-board as a fascinating bridge to time-shifting HDTV for the rest of us. However, based on our experiences over the past week with the shipping version of the HDTV Wonder, and supplemented by user experiences chronicled on AVS Forum and Rage 3D that mirror our results, we cannot recommend the HDTV Wonder at this time. In fact, the product is now widely referred to as the HDTV "Blunder" by users on both forums. Even though we gave it a good rating of 7 out of 10, based on subsequent testing, we've lowered that to a 5. Here's why, from editor-in-chief Jim Louderback's first-hand experiences.
 
Much Anticipation...and Disappointment

About two weeks ago, the much-anticipated HDTV Wonder card showed up at my door. I'd been dying to build a Home Theater PC around the card—in part because I'm too cheap to add a $1,000 TiVo HD unit to my three regular TiVos--I set out to build a killer home theater PC. Designed around an Opteron FX CPU, ASUS motherboard, oodles of disk and RAM, and an ASUS 9800XT, with the HDTV Wonder as the crowning touch, I was sure I'd be ready to pause and time-shift all the important football games due up in early September.

Building the unit itself was fairly straightforward—despite my inability to find a heat-sink to mate with the odd processor. But the real problems started once I dropped the HDTV Wonder into the system.


Things seemed okay at first. The card appeared to work fine out of the gate, picking up the local HD-Net broadcast on San Francisco's KRON channel. The other network HD offerings delivered well over 80% signal strength, using ATI's own software.

And in fact I already knew over-the-air signals would work fine here at home. I've had a Samsung T-160 HDTV /DirecTV receiver for months, and I can receive most of the local channels with ease. Perhaps because I have line-of-sight, over the Pacific Ocean, to the broadcast towers.

But once I started actually trying to watch TV, things got dicey. Only about a quarter of a screen's worth of the local ABC affiliate, KGO, displayed when I switched to that channel. And that was on a good day. More regularly I'd switch to the channel and nothing would come up at all—while the freeze-frame of the prior channel displayed.

I was understandably upset. As a football fan, I was eagerly anticipating time-shifting Monday Night football. Alas, that was not to be.

As I dove into the hardware, more problems resulted. Even on channels that came in fine, there was so much freeze-frame stuttering as to make the video unwatchable. ATI uses an obscure data store on a PC's hard drive—called the library—to store recorded and time-shifted program material. My library rapidly filled up with hundreds of entries, none of which could be deleted. Even if the programs I'd selected to record had been watchable, it was nigh on impossible to find them.

But the frustrating inability for the system to tune into the key ABC and CBS stations were what really frustrated me. PBS came in just fine, but these two local channels—with the bulk of NFL coverage—came in haltingly if at all.


Even recorded material from PBS looked terrible on my 42" plasma. I eventually figured out how (after painstakingly searching through all the myriad setup screens) to display full-screen HDTV content live on my wide-screen set in full-screen mode. I never did figure out how to do the same with recorded material. ATI's playback function naturally assumed that my 1024x768 plasma was a 4x3 screen, and letterboxed the material. The applet was woefully unprepared for the concept of rectangular pixels.

After spending pretty much every night for a week uninstalling, reinstalling and tweaking drivers, I'd had enough. I even went and purchased a $50 bow tie HDTV antenna—perhaps the bundled indoor antenna and tuner simply sucked. But even that did no good. What with the stuttering, inability to tune in key stations and odd software quirks, I'd concluded that this product was just not ready for prime-time.
As a last resort, I clicked over to the awesome AVS Forum, where I've uncovered great help, tips and advice in the past. Obviously I should have stopped by sooner, because the assembled masses had all uncovered the same problems I had, and even figured out workarounds for many of them. Here's what I learned there.


Can't See ABC TV: Turns out that the HDTV Wonder has trouble with certain 720p transmissions. Although some work, others cannot be interpreted by the hardware or the software. A number of California Bay Area early adopters ran into the same problem, and one expert even uncovered a fix. Jump from a 720p station that can be recognized, like the local Fox channel, directly to the unintelligible one, and for some reason it actually works. A kludge, but a successful one. The Fox fix may not work for long, though. A number of users have run into reception problems with Fox channels that have upgraded to a new delivery capability—which should be implemented at all Fox outlets by early September. So my fix may be temporary at best.
Stuttering playback: This one was widespread. For many users, who attempted to add a "Blunder" card to system using nVidia chipsets, or non-ATI DirectX9 cards, the choices were grim. Using the original drivers worked in some cases, others were hopeless—only substituting an ATI 9600 card seemed to fix the problems. Mine seemed to be a bit more prosaic, as my graphics card—the 9800XT—was as ATI vanilla as they come. One suggestion on the boards—allocating a dedicated IRQ to the card--solved the problem. Once I determined the problem, fixing it was fairly easy. My ASUS SK8V had assigned interrupt 18 to both the internal Promise RAID controller and the "Blunder." Since I wasn't' using RAID, simply disabling the feature in the BIOS fixed the stuttering problem.
Inability to Delete Recorded Material: Eventually my 160GB hard drive will fill up with time-shifted and buffered HD material. And there's nothing I can do about it. None of the entries in ATI's TV storage area, called the library, can be deleted. This is a more obscure problem. I ran into only one other user on the AVS Forum site that had the same issue—and others parroted ATI's suggestion to me that I simply right-click and delete. That might work for them, but it sure doesn't work on my system (nor on at least on other person's PC). No fix here yet.

Reading through the forums uncovered a wide range of other problems, incompatibilities and other issues. Many other users, like me, spent the better part of a week or more trying to get this frustrating product working right. Some users found that adding an older ATI DirectX 9 card, like the 9600, solved the problems. Others found that they needed to rollback their Catalyst graphics card or nForce motherboard drivers to an earlier version for everything to work. Still others found that the "Blunder" would work in their Intel-based systems, but not in the AMD models
As for me, now that I've put in a beefy antenna, tweaked the BIOS, and arranged the channels to progress from viewable to confusable, things seem almost OK. I still can't play back material on my plasma in native resolution, and eventually my hard drive will fill up with video that cannot be deleted—but at least tomorrow's football game should be recorded accurately.

Note: It did record correctly, but due to a Fox HDTV problem, only the first quarter was actually broadcast in HD--more issues in HDTV land than just balky hardware, apparently.

Still, even for us tweakers, no product should require 20 hours, innumerable software reloads and regular visits to forums to get working correctly. And to ATI's credit, they did release new drivers last week that fixed many of the egregious problems—although none of my particular issues.


But the upshot is: ATI released a product that was not ready for prime time. They failed to test it on many of the common platforms, including nForce and other AMD-based systems, and with non-ATI graphics cards. They also failed to test it with the wide-range of HDTV signals being broadcast across the US, which also led to big problems.

Our New Bottom Line

Jim's problems were certainly serious. We can't say for sure whether his AMD-based platform was the culprit. In our review, the original test system was a small form-factor Intel 865-based platform, and we didn't encounter these issues. We certainly found fault with the HDTV Wonder, including our top ten list of the things the product needed. But that, compounded with the additional problems we (and many others) have uncovered has compelled us to lower the product's rating by two stars, to five out of ten.

 
Pros: Very good image quality, both live and in time-shifted mode; recorded content looks very good as well; functions as both an NTSC and HDTV tuner; nice price.
 
Cons: Unstable in some configurations; poor playback support on wide-screen displays; improper display of some channels, including ABC in San Francisco; works best with ATI graphics cards.
 
Summary: Though it's a decent first effort, HDTV Wonder is marred by incomplete and buggy software in some configurations. The $200 price includes both a remote and a good indoor antenna, not to mention ATI's suite of multimedia applications. There are quite a few rough edges still to be sanded.

[borghe]

umm.. damn.. that really sucks.. I was thinking about putting together an interim DVR for the bedroom with this until the HD Tivos came down closer to $600-700....

oh well, guess I wait for a price drop on the HD Tivos...

on a good note the iwfe has approved another HD Tivo "When they become a little cheaper." She loves the fact that even during heavy rains we can still record/watch OTA without any problem... and is finally coming around to the PQ difference between SD and HD..

[StarvingForHDTV]

Originally posted by Gregg Lengling
By ExtremeTech Staff  
 
As a last resort, I clicked over to the awesome AVS Forum, where I've uncovered great help, tips and advice in the past. Obviously I should have stopped by sooner, because the assembled masses had all uncovered the same problems I had, and even figured out workarounds for many of them.

Always check AVS before purchasing electronics.  That's my rule at least.

Starving