HDTV Wonder and 1080i - audio works but no video
Recently I decided to make my own quick and dirty HD-DVR by installing an ATI HDTV Wonder. Installation was pretty painless and since I had a ATI Radeon 9200SE I finally got everything working smoothly (Note: in order to get the ATI Multimedia Software installed correctly I had to download the latest drivers from the ATI website).
When I was finally up and running I could watch digital 480i and 720p channels (the included antenna is quite nice since I am about 25 miles from the broadcast station). With the 1080i channels, however, I could see that I had a strong signal and the audio was coming in perfectly but I couldn’t see any video. Also, the 480i and 720p playback was a little choppy - every minute or so the video and audio would skip - it was definitely still watchable, but I wanted to address this problem as well.
I searched around online and noticed that a lot of people have had this same problem so I decided to contact ATI support about it. The first two layers of support were useless - they just told me to uninstall the ATI multimedia center and reinstall it - I knew that wasn’t it but I tried anyway - it didn’t work.
Finally my case was escalated and I received a real answer - in order to display 1080i (apparently from any source) you need to have DirectX 9.0 or higher. For the Radeon line this means a 9500 or higher - there was my problem. I am amazed that in all the forums I checked out nobody realized this - it’s a pretty simple explanation.
So I installed the ATI Radeon 9600 with 256MB of DDR memory and reinstalled the ATI Catalyst software and DirectX 9.0. I could immediately see an improvement in video playback (ie, no skipping), but then the TV tuner stopped working. I uninstalled everything ATI and started over from the beginning, first installing Catalyst and the installing the drivers and applications that came with the HDTV Wonder. After my final reboot everything worked great and I am now streaming 1080i signals to my 42″ Sony Wega HDTV flawlessly.
My next project is to actually get TitanTV to work with the HDTV Wonder - every time I try a dialog box just flashes and then closes… stay tuned.
Posted in Video
March 20th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
Hey did you ever get titantv to work with your hdtv wonder? it is driving me nuts, I just want it to work!!
March 20th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Honestly, we could never get TitanTV to work - I noticed in online forums that quite a few people were having the same problems, but there were a few people who claimed to have got it to work - I have contacted TitanTV to ask them about the possible cause.
March 20th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Cool, well thanks, keep this thread posted if they say anything back. Thanks! I’m this close to sending it all back for all the troubles that I have had. Have you gotten your remote wonder plus to function or even install properly?
March 20th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
Yeah, I got the remote to work but to be honest it isn’t very good - I have to point my remote directly at the receiver and I can only be like 5 feet away - most of the time I don’t even use it because it’s less of a hassle to just walk across the room and change the channel.
Are you having any other problems than the TitanTV thing and the issue with your remote?
March 20th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
Well, you’re very lucky. I had the remote working wonderfully, but nothing else really was. Then when I re-installed everything cleanly, everything worked great except for the remote. I can’t even get it to finish installing without a stupid .dll file error. I’ve found forums where other people were having similar problems, but no solutions. ATI has not offered any solution either. To be honest, the remote was the thing I was looking forward to most. I figured if I couldnt have that, at least maybe I could still schedule things and have a semi-tivo working, but I can’t get any kind of automatic sheduler working. Do you have any automatic scheduler? I have to just pretty much manually program everything. Thanks for your help, it’s nice to actually be in contact with someone over this stupid thing.
March 21st, 2006 at 7:59 am
As far as remotes go there are way better options than the all-in-wonder, but as I’m sure you can guess they are much more expensive. My friend just got a logitech remote that he loves and it’s more like a real remote.
I have just been using the automatic schedule included in the ATI software - so far it has done a pretty good job. Have you tried that at all? My only real problem with the ATI software is that I cannot export a file to a different format, but that’s not that big of a deal. I had this pipe dream of sharing video files between my media center and my Tivo - I doubt I’ll ever get that working.
If you’re interested in Logitech remotes (they just bought harmony) check out this link:
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/features/harmony/CA/EN,CRID=2078
March 21st, 2006 at 10:32 pm
Yeah, I’m not sure if I want to spend the money right now, but thanks for the suggestion.
When you say you’ve used the automatic shcedule that comes with the software, do you mean the guideplus program?
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:00 am
No, I couldn’t find any digital content in the guideplus program so I haven’t used that at all. When you open up the digital TV application (or analog) then click on “options” (this could be different depending on the version you are running) it has a tab for “scheduling.” I have setup a few scheduled things in there.
The thing I don’t like about it is I can’t search for programs, etc. and have it record them. I can just set it to record a certain channel at a certain time. The nice thing is that you can set it to do that every day, once a week, one time only, etc.
I use a Tivo for my analog channels and this isn’t even close to how seamless the Tivo experience is - I have been toying with the idea of trying Freevo or MythTV to see if they can compare but I haven’t been able to bring myself to install Linux on my media center machine yet. I am thinking about repartitioning and dual-booting linux and MCE.
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March 8th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Do you guys know if the HDTV Wonder will only work with ATI Radeon 9500,9600,9700,9800 Series Graphics Cards? I have been fighting with this HDTV Wonder for over a year now.Any help would be great. Current Config Below:
P4-3.02
512MB
NVidia Quadro4 980 256MB AGP 8x
Realtek AC97 Onboard Sound (Sucks, I Know)
DirectX 9.0C
120GB HDD
Thanks,
David Pino
July 8th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
I am having the same problem with
NVidia QuadroFX 3000 256MB AGP 8x
Opteron 248 2GHZ
2GB RAM
September 28th, 2007 at 3:18 am
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