ATI Brings Digital TV to Your PC

Hesitant to drop thousands on a new television just to get high-definition broadcasts? Who could blame you, what with the ongoing confusion about whether you can get HD, how many channels you can get, and whether you can record it. But here's a stopgap: ATI's HDTV Wonder, a $199 PCI card that brings over-the-air HDTV to your computer.

Besides receiving both analog and free digital TV, the HDTV Wonder has digital video recorder functions, so you can watch, pause, and record these transmissions, and save them to your system's hard drive, to CD, or to DVD. Your PC must have a DirectX 9-compatible graphics card, which will cost at least an additional $150 if you don't already have one.

The HDTV Wonder, released this summer, comes with some extras. Included are a remote control for Media Center-like PCs that operate in the living room; a small HDTV antenna (usually around $40 when sold separately); and a breakout box to import video from an analog camcorder or VCR. Thankfully, almost any PC monitor has sufficient resolution to do HD broadcasts justice.

The antenna helps determine whether you can get over-the-air HD. Broadcasters have been required by the FCC since May 2002 to transmit digital signals in addition to the analog ones they've been pushing since the dawn of television. But digital signals must overcome the same problems as the old analog ones: terrain and distance.

Hands-On HDTV

I tested the HDTV Wonder in two locations: PC World's downtown San Francisco offices and my home in a Bay Area suburb. In both places, when I could receive the HD broadcast, the shows looked fantastic. Shows like Las Vegas and Crossing Jordan had such stunning clarity that you wanted to watch just to marvel at the display.

However, when I tried the HDTV Wonder at my hilly neighborhood home, the device could receive just seven channels--and three were variations of the same NBC affiliate. Three others were Spanish-language stations, and the last was a local independent channel; none of those last four broadcast HD content. I even connected the card to an old UHF antenna on the top of my house--it didn't help.

Even when I could get a strong signal, as reported by an included utility, the video and audio occasionally hesitated, and sometimes only the audio cut out.

I used a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 system with 1GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9600 XT graphics card, which should have had plenty of horsepower for the job. However, running the application severely taxed my PC's resources. ATI specifies a 1.3-GHz Celeron as the minimum configuration; based on my experience, I think that's stretching. You'll do better to have more CPU power.

Location Counts

Then I tried the card in our Test Center, which is within eyesight of Sutro Tower, a structure that hosts antennas for most of the city's network television affiliates. A new 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 system with a PCI Express graphics card was the test bed; with the antenna perched on a windowsill, the HDTV Wonder brought in 20 stations--again with some duplicates, but this time the list included most of the major networks. And the application barely strained the PC's resources. The product's effectiveness may vary with your location, especially your proximity to transmissions.

The device has a second RF port, so you can connect a cable-TV input. However, you must shut down the digital TV application and start up a separate one for cable (and no, you can't get HD that way, because the device can't descramble the transmission). The applications worked identically except that, on my PC, the application for analog cable broadcasts switched channels much more quickly and suffered no performance hiccups. But then, the reception didn't make me want to call friends and neighbors over for a party, as the HD ones did.

With either application you can easily record and time-shift broadcasts--and for HD broadcasts, that capability is very rare, even for over-the-air broadcasts. The functions are easy to set up and use.

The most important factors that will determine whether the HDTV Wonder will work for you are where you live and how powerful your PC is. Unfortunately, you won't be able to answer those questions for yourself without actually buying the product. If it turns out you can't watch much HD with the HDTV Wonder, at least you can watch cable TV, even if it isn't quite as wonderful to look at.