HDTV Forum

MCE 2005 does NOT support software software encoded capture cards / DVD players. Essentially, the NTSC side of the HDTV Wonder card is rendered inoperable. Only the ATSC side of the card will work.

Looks like I'm rebuilding on XP Pro.

Thank you for that useful bit of info. It'll keep me from MCE2005.

MCE2005 = Media Center Edition 2005 is a new OS from M$, a variation on W-XP, to better support video, DTV, media burning, etc.

Basically it's Windows XP Pro with an "enhancement" called Media Center. Media Center is Microsoft's collapse and distribution point for DVD / Video Capture / HDTV / MP3 / Photo's, etc.

After some serious digging here's the whole story.

In MCE 2005, Microsoft no longer wants vendors to software encode MPEG2, rather they want the Media Center software to receive the MPEG2 stream from hardware decoders only. This makes a lot of stuff invalid in MCE2005, including WinDVD, the ATI HDTV Wonder, the Fusion III HD capture, several NTSC capture's, etc. This stuff all works under XP Home/Pro, and most of it works under Media Center 2004.

Microsoft's solution for HD reception seems to be external, USB attached decoders feeding into Media Center.

Sounds like M$ is still trying to play "catch up" to Apple's Mac OS X based on Unix.
I use Windows XP too, but when the box said "Requires Windows 98 or better" I went Mac for "better" things in video. Not necessarily more features, just solid performance that works. Apple's Final Cut Pro HD is an industry standard for HDTV production. It even won an Emmy award.

Apple has concentrated on both home and pro video and DVD production, but is not into using a PC as a HDTV set as far as I know, but PC cards usually work if the vendor wants to make the Mac drivers.

As an example this link has a Mac HDTV recorder, but I know nothing about it:
http://www.supermediastore.com/eyetv-50 ... order.html

At less than $400 with HDTV tuner I might even learn more, except my #@!$@ local network affiliates still do not broadcast any network HDTV OTA programs.

I rebuilt the whole system on XP Pro and everything is good again in the world.

The ATI HDTV Wonder runs well, but the lack of integration into a guide (like Titantv) makes recording more than a day out a real beast. Nice card to experiment with.

I have done some comparions with the tuners between the HDTV Wonder and my Toshiba DST3000.

The HDTV wonder demonstrates the generation gap in 8VSB tuners.

I live in the Suburbs of Philly, about 15 miles (as the crow flies) from the tower farm. The DST3000 pulls all of these stations using a Radio Shack UHF-Only Yagi (15-2160) mountd in the attic. There are some other PBS stations in NJ, 20 miles away towards the shore area (basically behind my antenna) which the DST3000 can not pull unless I rotate the antenna 180 degress.

With the antenna pointed towards Philly, the HDTV Wonder pulls all of the those stations and the ones behind the antenna... no rotation needed.

I have also noticed intermittent lip-sync issues for as long as I've had the DST. I recently found a show with lip-sync problems on the DST and the HDTV wonder worked fine.