Placa De Captura Externa Tv Wonder Usb 2.0

With the advent of Personal Video Recorders or the "PVR", TV and Multimedia industries have entered a new realm of technology.  The ability to pause, rewind, and record live TV all with the click of a button is not only cool, it is extremely convenient.  Let's be honest, how often do you have the time to catch your favorite TV shows all the time, every time one is on?  The one downfall of owning a PVR up to this point, is the price.  Most PVR's will run you upwards of $300 and while the thought of having one is truly exciting, in most cases, it simply doesn't justify the price. 

ATi Tecnologies, mostly known for its line of consumer graphics cards, has a long history of TV Tuner cards for the PC that have the ability to capture live TV in "TiVO" fashion.  Up to this point, PC users had the option to purchase an add-in card from ATI's line of All-In-Wonder cards or TV Wonder cards.  Most PC enthusiasts don't mind having to take apart their case and throw in a video card, but there are some that would prefer not to do that.  Some may think it's annoying to take apart their cases.  What about laptop owners?  Today in the HotHardware labs, we have the ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 which brings live TV to anyone with a machine that sports a USB 2.0 port.  We'll take a close look at what the TV Wonder USB 2.0 has to offer and show you how easy getting live TV can be.

Features and Specifications What You Get

The TV WONDER USB 2.0 - Close-up Powered by the ATI Theater 200

The TV Wonder USB 2.0 is housed in a gray box about the size of a human hand.  As you can see, a variety of connections are supplied.  The Antenna In f-connector is located on one side while the USB and Power connectors are located on the opposite side.  Finally, an S-Video composite connecor as well as audio and video in connectors are supplied.  This allows an external source such as a camcorder or DVD player to be fed through this device and watched on the PC. Incidentally, the bundle provided we looked at here is not a retail package and was rather simplistic with a power adapter and installation CD.

The TV Wonder USB 2.0 is powered by ATI's Theater 200 chip.  This is the same chip found on a majority of the All-In-Wonder solutions from ATI.  This chip is very advanced and handles quite a bit of the product over all feature set responsibilities, from video and stereo audio processing to signal replication.  This chip is tried and true and ATI engineers have been able to get the most out of it through years of enhancements and improvements.