ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 issues

[jbuturff]

I am using the Trial version of BTV 4.1, with an ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 on Windows XP (SP2), hooked to a Dell Latitude D600 with 1 GB RAM. I am having two issues that I have been unable to resolve, and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

1) Using the LIVE TV function, the video is very laggy and not watchable, unless I change the Recording type and crank the bitrate and resolution way down. Is this because of Timeshifting? It appears to be writing to the drive a LOT, and my laptop drive can't keep up with the I/O. Can the Timeshifting be disabled? In LiveTV mode, I just want to get a raw video feed, and don't really want to use Timeshifting...

2) The audio every couple minutes will just "white noise" out for a couple seconds, then come back. This happens in both recordings and LiveTV.

This product seems far superior to the ATI bundled software, with these two exceptions. Again, any advice on these would be appreciated.

[tscales]

Well, the most likely problem is the ATI TV Wonder. It is a very low-end, software encoder based TV tuner. I have one, but it is in a drawer because I don't bother with it. I'd suggest the Hauppauge PVR USB2 (NOT the WinTV). You'll get fantastic results.

Tom

[jbuturff]

Thanks for the input.

I could buy that answer except for the fact that everything works as expected thru the ATI software. And I would stick with the ATI software, except it has other limitations that I would rather use the BTV software (such as recording in the background without having the TV on, interface that is controllable thru the remote, etc).

Any other thoughts on how to fix these issues?

[tscales]

Understood. I use mine occasionally with the ATI software. BTV is so much better that I didn't care that it required better cards.