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Manual
Software CD
Audio connectors and adapters
The TV Wonder external tuner

The manual is quite thorough and explains the installation procedures for both the hardware and software well. It is about 70 pages long and has a number of diagrams to make things even easier.

The CD contains the drivers and software for operating the tuner. The ATI software includes a TV tuner, a video CD player, a multimedia file player, a CD audio player, a Launchpad of quicklinks. The CD also contains a program called Guide Plus which I will discuss further in the Impressions section.

The connectors that are included give the unit full-functioning capabilities right out of the box.

Installation

The installation of the TV Wonder USB on my system went fairly easily. I installed it in both Windows 98 as well as Windows 2000 and everything went fine in both. USB devices tend to be fairly easy to install.

The interesting thing about this unit is that it acts as both a video input device as well as an audio input device, which makes the physical installation much easier. On the All In Wonder line, an audio cable is needed to connect the sound-out on the video card into the sound-in on the soundcard. This makes things a little cluttered in back of the computer so the slick, single cable installation process with the TV Wonder USB is quite nice. The fact that it is two devices in one also makes the driver installation a little more detailed, but everything is covered handily in the manual.

It wasn’t until the actual operation of the device that things got interesting…

Impressions

Upon first run, a simple setup dialog is executed to configure the TV Wonder USB device which automatically scans the cable input for available channels:

Unlike the non-standard interface of Matrox’s software (as seen in our review of the Marvel G450 eTV), ATI’s software uses the standard windows interface making it easier to use.

The software also includes a handy quicklink bar:

The TV tuner fully supports closed captioning and also uses the text provided by this service in a couple of cool ways. The software can be set to start recording or popup on the screen when certain “hot words” show up in the text. This is cool if you are waiting for a certain part of a program, but don’t feel like watching the entire show. There is also a feature called TV Magazine – the closed captioning text is saved to an HTML along with period screen shots from the show. When the TV Tuner is minimized, it replaces the background of the desktop with the video input -- a cool feature that is unique to ATI.

It is also possible to schedule recording the video/audio to an .avi file. Like the other video input, the saved video is limited to 320x240 resolution, which is rather small. It is also not possible to use MPEG technology to compress the video on the fly so a lot of disc space is required to use the recording features.