Theater 650 Pro Discussion

[mrceolla]

BTW, the new drivers enable MCE's signal strength meters to work.

But on the down side, when I'm switching through digital channels that don't come in well, my system reboots. Anyone have this before?

[denyart]

If you only want HD reception, you will still need an analog tuner to allow this in Media Center 2005, but you don't need to use the 650 for HD. You can use many other ATSC tuners such as the ATI HDTV Wonder, the VBox DTA 150, the DVICo Fusion 5, AverMedia MCE A180, Hauppauge has a new analog/digital tuner, there are many USB ATSC tuners as well. I have used the AverMedia A180, the ATI HDTV Wonder, the ATI 650 and the VBox DTA 150. My personal favorite is the VBox. The signal strength meters in MCE don't quite work right with this tuner's driver, but they wrote a stand-alone app for that and when it comes to actually tuning in channels I found it to be the best. As for the fancy stuff such as the comb filter and the advanced processing of the 650, they don't help digital TV at all. Digital TV is already encoded, and all the tuner needs to do is tune it in and demodulate it get the digital transport stream. This transport stream is passed to the system and the tuner is now done. For this reason all of them (digital ATSC tuners) should be the same. Reliable drivers and good tuning ability are the most important aspect in my opinion. The 650 is not a really strong contender in these regards. I use my 650s for analog TV because here the fancy comb filters and other processing can make a big difference, but I think they are the weakest digital tuners I have tried in terms of reception ability.

[mrceolla]

Well, I think I found my problem. The glitches I was seeing that would go away when playing the footage a second time, have been attributed to my onboard SoundMax audio on my Asus p4p800 SE.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=465419

...states

"Q. DVD Playback skips, what can I do about it?
A. It is likely you are using the coax or optical out from your motherboard. It has been observed on a few motherboard using Soundmax: solution can be
- find a driver for your motherboard that can fix the problem. One is listed in this thread , see if it works for you
- buy a soundcard to bypass the motherboard, and disable on board audio in the Bios"

This tipped me off. Tried a few fixes, then decided to buy another sound card.

I have since purchased an external soundblaster and disabled my onboard audio. I do not see the same problems any longer. Most things now play smoothly throughout, except for the occasional signal glitch. Given my TV can hold a signal that this card can't, and considering that ATSC bypasses the 650's fancy 3d comb filter and such, I'm inclined to try a different ATSC tuner. CompUsa has the new Hauppauge hvr-1600 and I think I'm going to try it and see if it can pick up the channels any better than the 650. We'll see how it goes.

Mike

[Imd77]

Hi guys, what ever happened with the release of a european model of the card?
I'm from Greece, Europe and I'm looking for a TV card for both PAL/DVB-T. I know ATI's Theater 650 Pro chipset can do this but after so much time waiting shall I give up on the idea?

[csy]

I am another person from a PAL country (New Zealand) who has been patiently waiting for over 6 months for the PAL/DVB-T version to be released. I am disappointed that PAL countries have had to wait so long, and hope the PAL/DVB-T version will be released soon.

[modin]

I just installed three ATI Wonder 650 cards in my HTPC replacing three Hauppauge PVR-250 cards and now I'm seeing herringbone noise in the recordings which wasnt there when I was using the PVR-250 cards. I dont see this noise when I watch cable TV directly. I'm running XP Home SP2 on a HTPC with a 3.2 ghz Northwood with Intel 865PERL motherboard, 1 gig PC3200 dual channel memory and Gigabyte fanless 9600 Pro video card. I'm using analog cable via an four-way Electroline splitter/amplifier. I'm using the Sage 6.019 PVR program and have installed the ATI 6.14.10.225 drivers for the Wonder 650 cards. I attempted to install the ATI Control Panel for Wonder 550/650 cards but it gave me error messages so I went back to a disk image made before the failed installation.

Has anyone encountered this problem before? Any idea how to fix it? Thanks.

[cygnus2112]

I'm out of patience.

I'm a newbie to PVR. Our VCR broke recently and I figured what the heck, spend some of the Christmas bonus money on myself and get the ATI 650 TV Wonder. I like to do research so I read tons and tons of online reviews of the card and there were heaps of praises about it having the best picture quality (sure you guys know of the ones I'm talking about just reading through this thread.) Too bad Google didn't pull up *this* thread while I was looking for "ATI 650 reviews", hah!

Anyway, the bundled Catalyst Media Center software was disappointing. Apparently since I'm an American stuck in Canada (yes, pity me), I can't get EPG because ATI has chosen TitanTV (American zipcodes only). I tried to install Guide Plus+ but it won't install because I don't have MMC. I tried various third-party softwares, from ChrisTV, BeyondTV, and GB-PVR. They all have various issues. Video playback is the best in Catalyst Media Center and ChrisTV, but no EPG. There's EPG in GB-PVR and BeyondTV, but the recorded video quality is HORRIBLE. And now to find out the card (I have the 100-703261) has been recalled before due to quality months ago and they're still selling the cards?

I'm just frustrated now. I've decided to return the ATI 650 to the vendor I bought it from and choke up the 15% restocking fee plus shipping. This decision was driven by reading comments from you guys stating "I wish I could return it but now it's too late." I don't want to utter those same words, so I've really got to personally thank you for saving me some regret.

Now I'm going to have to find if anyone will ship a Hauppauge HVR-1600 to a Canadian address and hope that card can handle what the ATI couldn't. I shouldn't be surprised about the ATI 650 though, I owned an ATI Radeon before and the drivers were always a nightmare - always had to resort to using third party (Omega) drivers to get it to work right.


Do you guys have any suggestions about what I should buy for a PVR solution?

[denyart]

I would say the easiest interface for someone who wants simple PVR functions and a Guide is actually Windows Media Center. I know this is a terrible thing to say, and it almost hurts to say it, but when you want an answer that is what I would give. If you were not happy with the 650 in Media Center you could try the Hauppauge (I have no knowledge of how good or bad this is though), or one of the other options that work with Media Center. There are a lot of cards that support Media Center and will tune digital TV. There aren't as many hybrid tuners that tune both digital TV and analog, but in my opinion it seems best to get separate tuners for that at the moment. Even if there is a hybrid tuner that works well for both applications, it may always have limitations unless it can really operate as both an analog tuner and a digital tuner at the same time (VBox 164). There is no good way to answer your question, but I would say any of the supported tuner cards in the Media Center interface are going to be the most straight forward in your case.

[Bunga]

I recently purchased the TV Wonder 650 and have been having an unusual problem with the Catalyst Media Center software. Every time I start up Windows, CLCapSvc.exe generates an error and shuts itself down. After a couple days of messing around with it, I ended up doing a reformat/clean install of Windows and everything worked fine. As soon as I installed Kaspersky AV the problem started again. So there is obviously a conflict between Kaspersky and Catalyst Media Center. I tried adding CMC to the scan exclusion scope, but still no luck. I do not know what else to try.

Has anyone else experienced this problem?

I am having the exact same problems and can't seem to get it fixed. ATI Tech Support (now that's an oxymoron) say's it won't work on some computers including mine.

Have you gotten anywhere with yours yet?

[Octavean]

Let me just add for those considering the TV Wonder 650 that there are some other solutions out there to consider. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy a TV Wonder 650 because I have one and I am reasonably happy with it but to not consider other products is to not make an informed buying decision.


Therefore:

Hauppauge WinTV - HVR - 1600 Hybrid Dual Analog and Digital Tuner Remote plus IR blaster ~$99.99 USA
You can actually control a STB with this thing and its included remote - IR Blaster
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/produ...a_hvr1600.html


HDHomeRun Dual Networked Digital TV Tuner with functional QAM support ~$200 USA
In the clear QAM, you know what that means!!!
http://www.silicondust.com/
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/160595.aspx

[mrceolla]

The Hauppauge remote and blaster of course aren't 100% MCE compatible. I tried out the HVR-1600 as I mentioned earlier. I did some reasearch after failed attempts to get the remote to work with MCE, and the concensus seemed to be that it is not a good MCE remote. I read the ATI remote can be programmed to work well with MCE, but it takes some hacking. However, the MCE compatible remote offered through ATI works perfectly. That's what I chose to do w/ the free remote offer with this card. If any of you have trouble choosing the MCE compatible remote through the offer web page, just call the Shop ATI people. The web page kept saying my coupon had expired when I tried to select the 50% MCE remote. Anyway, I got the ATI MCE compatible remote, plugged it in, and it worked 100% w/o installing a thing.

Back to the HVR-1600, it's reception was no better than the 650 for me, and that was my main reason for trying it. Then I realized it didn't even have an FM tuner (not that I'd use it). So I decided to keep the 650.

Now on to a problem I've mentioned earlier and have still not found a solution. Every time I first play back live TV after I start MCE the video playback is all fud up. Usually, there is a frozen frame in the upper left corner of the screen. Other times, there is either a full screen of green, or a strange green checker board like pattern. If I hit back to put the live TV in that little MCE video window, the video shows and plays. If I put the video full screen again, that same frozen frame is in the upper left corner. If I then use my mouse and double click the very top of the screen to minimize MCE to a window mode, the video shows and plays full screen (but only in that window of course). Finally, when I restore MCE to full screen, all is well.

What the heck is causing this? If I can't fix it, is there a way to minimize restore MCE via the remote?

Thanks,
Mike

[denyart]

Minimize by the remote is not really possible, but with a keyboard shortcut it can be done. It is possible that you could use a program to do this (one of the add-ons people have written). I know all you need to do is hit the green button (twice) to bring the windowed MCE back to full screen. I used to have this problem for a little while, and after a clean reinstall it went away. I know this isn't very helpful, but I think it is something you can get rid of. You could try uinstalling your video card driver and mpeg2 decoder and see if upon reinstall the problem goes away. It is the only thing I can think of that is simpler than a complete reinstall of the OS. FWIW, since I got rid of this problem it has never come back, so it appears to have been a really rare set of circumstances that brought it about in my case.

[vddobrev]

You could try uinstalling your video card driver and mpeg2 decoder and see if upon reinstall the problem goes away.

I had this problem, and it helped for me. Ever since, everytime I install a new video driver, I deinstall nVidia PureVideo Decoder, and then install it again.

Off topic: I need to buy a PowerColor T55E-P03 PCIe x1 tuner, but I cannot find any place that sells them. Can anyone help?

[Octavean]

Anyone see 32bit Vista Drivers yet?

A Vista MCE control panel would be nice too

Shouldn’t they be out by now,…..

Actually, shouldn’t they have been out yesterday,…..

[Octavean]

TV Wonder™ Elite/Theater™ 550 PRO/650 PRO TV Tuner Drivers for Windows Vista (32 bit)

Version 7.1
Jan. 31, 2007
6.9MB

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/v...0-vista32.html

***edit***

I have tested them and they seem to work well.

I only have my TV Wonder 650 configured as a digital tuner since I don’t want to deal with the non-concurrent limitations of the product so I cannot say if both analog and digital tuners are functional?

Anyone know?

[dabl]

Can anyone confirm the 650 can be used as an analog tuner only in Windows Vista?