Windows 7 and ati HDTV Wonder

I found your posting about getting the HDTV Wonder card to work under Windows 7 beta. You said that you used the latest driver and it works. I have one of these cards, so I am wondering what driver it was that you actually used. I downloaded the HDTV Wonder drivers for XP (the ones listed as WDM drivers) and that didn't seem to work. Should I have used other drivers to get this card to work? Any help you can provide me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

You can also just go to device manager and do a "driver update" on the devices shown as unknown that represent your HDTV Wonder. There's no need to install the ATI driver manually. I don't know why it doesn't install the driver during installation, but mine didn't either.

What version of Windows & are you using? 32 bit or 64 bit?
Im using 64 bit and Windows 7 found all the drivers for my HDTV Wonder, it took a second try for it to find the BDA Capture device but its all setup and MCE found my local channels and the signal strength (settings->TV->Tv Signal->Digital TV Antenna Signal Strength) is strong for the channels but It I keep getting "No TV Signal".

I am not sure how I did it, but it is possible to get Windows 7 MC to find both the Digital channels and the Analog channels. I had found an earlier thread regarding this for Vista and they said it was impossible for Windows MC to do this with the HDTV wonder. first, i tried installing the MS software suggested at windows update. that didn't work for me. then I read this thread about installing the latest ATI driver. that didn't work for me. I remember reading another posting somewhere about an MCEE.zip file (Kram ATI driver) which I had downloaded on Vista and that didn't seem to help much. I installed that file on Win 7 and also not much changed. I also downloaded and installed the latest Vista driver for my integrated video card from the ATI/AMD website. after all this, I only had the Digital Channels working. I wanted my cable channels as well, so I installed the XP software for the HDTV wonder hoping it would work. It didn't either, so out of frustration I went back to the earliest restore point available that day. After the restore, surprisingly everything worked. I know that is quite a process, but as of yet, I am not sure which things made it activate both the digital and the analog tuner capability of the HDTV wonder.

Absolutely nothing. Forgive what may seem as anger directed at you (it's not), I just don't get how people aren't understanding that this digital transition only has to do with OVER THE AIR signals, not cable or satellite. Analog cable will still be analog cable until the cable companies decide otherwise.

It seems that all the money our government has put in to funding education on the transition was pretty much wasted. I had a friend of mine get into an argument with me because he thought he needed to have an HDTV or an HD cable/satellite box after February because he didn't understand the difference between DTV and HDTV. And when people on the "tech" side of things still aren't clear, it really hits home that this was not the best handled process.
[/rant]

sorry to bring up an old post but im also running vista ultimate sp2 x64 and have the same issue as a couple of posts above...drivers are all installed from windows update and media center sees tuner and shows signal strength and everything but when you tune to a channel all i goet is a black screen with no audio and an eventual message that says no tv signal...anyone come up with a fix??

Has anyone that's installed the ATI HD Wonder in Win7, does it work with clearQAM stations? I know the ATI drivers doesn't support QAM in windows, but the hardware does support QAM like the drivers for Linux based MythTV setups. It would be awesome if the MS drivers for the HD wonder supports clear QAM.

Q

I just built a new system and installed Windows 7 on one of my two hard drives. The other drive has XP on it. I have them both set up in a RAID 0 array. I wondered if the card would still work so I searched for HDTV Wonder and Windows 7 info and found this thread.

That damn 7 is so cool! It detected my old HDTV Wonder card and automatically put the drivers in and poof!, I booted it up tonight and watched some over the air TV and some internet clips too. I didn't even think the HDTV Wonder card would work anymore after XP but it works like new! Gotta love the 7!!!

any one figure out whats going on? im having the same problem. All is well in signal strength area but i cant get any tv channels!

Im running win 7 32bit ( i tried 64 bit and had the same problem)
And yes; i rebooted lol

I didn't expect my HDTV wonder to work under Windows 7, and was really surprised when it did, after some updates and restarts.

My PC is setup to dual boot between Win 7 and XP, using separate drives for the op system.

After several days of trials and errors, it seems that I can get the HDTV wonder to work under both OSes, but sometimes something will get setup in the card and nothing but removal of power will make the tuner work when I switch between XP and Win 7. It goes both ways, so apparently something specific to the OS gets setup and there is nothing in the software to do a reset when it is started. The channels don't get lost, but the TV shows no signal when it is started. It takes more than just switching between OSes as sometimes I can switch and have the TV work in either OS without having to power down the PC. It probably has something to do with operating the tuner, but so far I haven't figured out what specifically causes the problem.

I use Media Center in Win 7 and ATI Multimedia Center in XP. Media center never worked as well as the ATI software when I used it under XP.

Any ideas or any software that will reset the card without having to do a power down?

Thanks,
Doug

My HDTV Wonder is running under Win 7 64 RC bld 7100 on an AMD64X2 3800+ processor. I found another posting that said that the tuner does not revive from an S1 Sleep state and the only way the poster found to revive it was to cycle the power.

That seems to agree with my findings, although I hadn't attributed it to Sleep as of yet. I thought I had some recordings scheduled for this AM, but when I checked there was nothing and the tuner was inop.

MCE seemed to recognize that it missed the recording and scheduled another occurrence of in later in the day.

This is bizarre!

I'll see if it will record if I don't let it go to sleep before the scheduled record time.

Mine works great under 7 but sometimes when I try to watch over the air TV, the media center will say that there is no signal on this channel or something like that, and it won't show any picture.

I found out that the reason it does this is because my TV antenna is not picking up the weak ass digital signal from one of the TV stations. lol So, it's not really 7's fault, it's the TV station broadcasting a weak signal and my antenna can't pick it up good enough to start the media center's TV player.

All I have to do to fix it is to start my TV player on another TV station that has a stronger digital signal, then once it shows a picture, I can simply switch channels to the weaker TV station and it will then show a picture! Strange the way it does that sometimes but at least I can watch my channels. I still love the 7!

I haven't found anything that will bring the HDTV wonder back to life once it goes into the sleep state (other than removal of power). Even if I boot into XP without doing a power down, the tuner shows no signal.

SLEEP never caused any problems under XP and it still doesn't. I installed a USB tuner from another desktop (for use under Win 7) and it seems to work as it should after resuming from SLEEP.

Hopefully when I get a released version of 7 on the machine it will fix things. If not, there may be an HDTV wonder up for sale.

I'm pleased with the way Win 7 works on my XP HTPC. I'm not sure if it is worth the effort to upgrade it on either my Vista Laptop or my other Vista desktop. So far for my use, the only compelling reason to upgrade is the improved way TV and recording is handled on Win 7 Media Center compared to the way it was on Vista Media Center or XP MC 2005

So that's what's happening! Sleep mode was turning off the tuner and it wasn't waking up. I was going crazy trying to figure out why it would stop working.

I had been using my HDTV wonder under Win 7 64 RC 7100. It worked OK, until the machine went to sleep and then only a power cycle would restore it.

I installed Win 7 64 released version and the HDTV wonderoperates exactly as it did under the RC. At one point, there were only 3 drivers of the 5 that were present under Win 7. Another time, after a reboot, all 5 were there and the tuner operated OK under media center until it went to sleep. I am using a Pinnacle USB tuner and it works fine. Media center would allow both tuners to operate, but I disabled the ATI since you can't be sure it will always work, unless you never let the PC sleep.

Unless someone at MS or ATI makes some changes, it appears that the ATI HDTV wonder is marginally useful under Win 7.
My machine is a dual boot w/ XP. The tuner used to work fine under XP and still does. I didn't test it, but I suppose it will still be inop if I switched from Win 7 to XP and the power was not cycled.

thinking of upgrading to an AMD Phenom II X4 3.0ghz AM3, 4GB DDR3 RAM, HTPC system, & Windows 7 (currently Windows XP MCE 2005). Curious as to if I can salvage this HDTV Wonder to this new system. I'd love to continue to utilize as I don't see much these days for OTA HD in terms of improvement; GPU will continue to decode MPEG2 TS, & ClearQAM doesn't interest me.

What I've gleaned thus far is it works, but with caveats.

e.g.
-digital tuner ok but no analog (fine by me)
-good signal but no actual reception
-s1 standby problems (power on suspend) doug? what about S3 suspend to RAM? Are you using MCE Standby? I would imagine the same since same system context is lost minus memory, but can you (or anyone) of you confirm?

*also doug, which device manager devices are you missing? I've included a screenshot of them for you.



Rdunton, are you running 64bit or x86 Win 7?

It seems this card is more troublesome in 64 bit OS which doesn't surprise me as ATI's drivers are old and probably aren't made for 64 bit. I wouldn't even dare installing MMC which I only use for analog capture with the inc. dongle anywa. MMC is the most horribly designed and bug ridden sw I've ever come across. It took me a full day just to get it working in XP MCE without the invarably 'tv unable to start bullcrap'. And that's running v9.14 as v9.16 flat out doesn't work.

The laborious process entails: install driver, dao/mdac, dvd decoder, and mmc in precise order; reboot; net stop ehvcrec everytime; stop terminal services - and still black screen? rinse, repeat, lol. Luckily MMC isn't relevant in 2009 and my need for analog capture...well, it isn't a need as I have no analog equipment, just sounded novel in the even I was to stream to Justin.tv, but I digress.

If I can at least get Media Center to pick up OTA channels, as it does now, and install DVRMSToolbox (don't see why not), I'm golden!

So... the question remains... 64bit or 32 bit on this HDTV Wonder in Windows 7? How are you folks faring with the RTM?

Let's get this suckas caveats on delineated.

To answer your question somewhat, here's what I've found (with Vista):

It worked fine in 32 bit, but my motherboard decided to flake out (was running Athlon x2-3800, 2gb ram) and I built a new phenom II x4 955BE (3.2ghz) with 4gb ram and installed 64-bit. Now I get the full signal but the channels don't actually show up when I try to watch. I believe when I first installed 32-bit, I had to use the windows xp 32-bit drivers to get it to work, but then MS released a driver update later and it continued to work. I'm currently installing updates in 64-bit and hopefully the driver will end up being updated (as MS only makes certain drivers available after certain updates, I can't be sure until it's all complete). If this doesn't work, I do have a free upgrade to win7 ultimate that I plan to install eventually but I want to get everything running in Vista first in case I decide to use the win7 upgrade on a different computer - and I'm worried the same problem will show itself in win7.

I did buy a hauppauge hvr 2250 but it bsods whenever it tries to tune a channel. As sometimes it uninstalls and then reinstalls itself on reboot, I think it's defective unit, but if I can get the hdtv wonder working I'll return it instead of exchanging as I don't really need dual tuners, it was just a nice to have kind of deal since the hdtv wonder wasn't working in 64-bit right off the bat.

In my case the card is working fine ith the 6.1 driver on Win7, I dont like WMC software, I use ArcSoft TotalMedia software and works great! Both analog and digital channels are easy to get. U can get that software from Isohunt.com

I have buy the Haupauge 2250 card and it works but not on the TotalMedia, so I will purchase an ASUS My Cinema-PHC3-150-NAQ-AV-RC (with a big analog tuner = thats GOOD!) just because u can see 2 channels at the same time. I have not tested it yet.

The ATI HDTV card is good but it dont have a very good image quality, thats other reason why I decide to change it. Latest ATI card like Theater 650 have a noise reduction feature that corrects that HDTV Wonder problem. Of course just in case u consider too much the image quality, in other cases the HDTV card is MUCH better than other new cards.

I'm still unable to get either card to work, looks like I'll be heading to best buy to exchange the hvr 2250 and see if it was a defective unit.

Are you referring to image quality in SD? Because HDTV Wonder in High Def OTA is indistinguishable (to my eyes) when compared to HD QAM over Cable.

Also as i understand it, the problem doesn't reside in wmc (my preferred choice) so you are running 32 bit I take it?

@bobzdar

that sucks I really want this card to work in a BF deal I'm about to jump on but its win 7 64 bit. it seems the answer is no to 64 bit and sorta to win7 x86.

damn...

I'm running the HDTV Wonder with W7 64 bit and having good success. Only running over the air though, as I don't have cable hooked up to my computer anymore like I used to. Here's a shot of a the first meeting between the Gmen and Cboys earlier this season that I took. Looks pretty good to me...

Which HDTV Wonder driver version did you install under Win7?

I have no idea. I had just built a new system and when I installed w7 on it, 7 automatically found the right drivers somehow and installed them. I didn't even know it had done it until I looked in my device manager and saw the ATI DTV Wonder stuff there. I got off big time when I saw that.

But looking just now under the ATI DTV Wonder Digital and Analog tuner device in there, it says driver version 3.0.83.2036, which has a date of 12/8/05. Hope that helps.