ATI E-Home Wonder

[jblade44]

I have a chance to get one of these OEM card's for under 100 Cdn... do you think it will work with BTV??? It has a hardware encoder and is MCE compatible??

Here is the ati link (not much info on it)

http://www.ati.com/products/ehome/index.html

[Brett]

I want to say no, but that is not a possitive no. Why try to save a few dollars and chance ending up with a dud. For $127 Amazon sales the 250 which has been proven to work _extremely_ well with Snapstream.

The E-Home Wonder is meant for OEMs only, you may not be able to get software/drivers for it all, since the software is intended to be Media Center Edition.

-Brett

[ctebo]

RadioActive's comments pretty much sum it up, but...

If you're of an adventurous bent, bear in mind that ATI is going to move all of their AIW cards to the same hardware encoder. It probably won't work with snapstream for some time, but you'll likely be able to get some software to work with it. Virtual VCR is reported to work with the ehome cards that have made it out there...

I live in Toronto and have a couple friends working at ATI HQ here in Toronto and have been working on getting one of their prototype AIW boards with hardware encoding. Hauppauge is going to face some very stiff competition in the coming months as both ATI and NVidia start shipping graphics cards that include hardware encoders.

Chris

[jblade44]

I think I will be the guinea pig and pick one up Monday if they have any left , I will call 1st as I have over an hours drive to get there...

If it does not work with BTV maybe it will work with Sage?? I am nearing the end of my trial peridod and the performance with my AverStudio card and NVDVD software encode with BTV is simply unacceptable....with the card I can compare between Sage and BTV b4 buying...wish me luck.

If not I can always resell it on ebay as a MCE card and I am sure I will at least get my money back... or I could try MCE myself...

[honer123]

Hauppauge is going to face some very stiff competition in the coming months as both ATI and NVidia start shipping graphics cards that include hardware encoders.

I can almost guarantee you they will be more expensive. I can even say they will be that way for a while, if they are coming built onto video cards. This will keep Hauppauge on top for a while. What will dethone Hauppauge will be a company which comes out with an MPEG4 hardware encoder card, which encodes in a format which all players can play, not just WinDVD.

My $0.02

Honer

[Brett]

A PVR250 is runs hot, A 9800 Pro is runs hot, how the hell you can cool them on one card as a 9800 All-in-wonder scares me...

-Brett

[jblade44]

Well.. I picked up the card today and it has the Conexant CX23416-12A (iTVC16)

It does not want to work with Snapstream... does not see the video in...

I tried it with Sage and it works perfectly...CPU less than 20%

Unless Snapstream can come up with a quick fix for this I guess that I will now will choose between Sage (will wait for V2 b4 buying though as 1.4 is ugly) and MCE. Too bad cause I really liked BTV interface and would have purchased it in a second if it had worked.

Since it is the almost same chipset as the 250 do you think it would work with the 250 drivers??

[richt]

Keep in mind, I am a long time customer and fan of Snapstream and have absolutely no desire to move to SageTV, but .........

Snapstream has been very busy adding features over the last few versions and has not added any new cards even though quite a few new hardware encoder devices are available. I personally have been waiting for support for the Yuan MPG600 (half height hardware encoder) for quite some time and have requested it through as many channels as I could think of. There hasn't been any official comment from Snapstream on my request, so on the positive side there haven't been any broken promises. BTW, the ATI card would do as it is also a half height hardware encoder.

What about it rkuo?

[soham]

Supporting new cards did take a back seat to other development during the 3.4 cycle, but I assure you that we are working on adding support to several new hardware encoders right now. As soon as they are done and pass testing, we will release them as a 3.4 refresh, so you won't have to wait for 3.5

Several of the cards that we are currently working on use the Conexant MPEG2 Encoder chip, so any card that exposes the standard Conexant API will just automatically work. I'm not sure if the ATI E-Home Wonder falls into this category, but we'll try to get one in-house and try it out.

[jblade44]

soham

If you need a beta tester I am ready and willing....

Thx

[soham]

Thanks for volunteering. I'll let you know when the time comes.

[Cayars]

Originally posted by soham
Supporting new cards did take a back seat to other development during the 3.4 cycle, but I assure you that we are working on adding support to several new hardware encoders right now. As soon as they are done and pass testing, we will release them as a 3.4 refresh, so you won't have to wait for 3.5

Several of the cards that we are currently working on use the Conexant MPEG2 Encoder chip, so any card that exposes the standard Conexant API will just automatically work. I'm not sure if the ATI E-Home Wonder falls into this category, but we'll try to get one in-house and try it out.

Out of curiousity, have any of these new cards produced better output then the PVR-250s?

Any HD cards on the list?

[soham]

We're still trying to work out all of the configuration details with the manufacturers, so it's hard to say. Only once we can configure the encoders exactly the same, and put them side-by-side, will we know how they perform.

[Mr.X]

What will dethone Hauppauge will be a company which comes out with an MPEG4 hardware encoder card, which encodes in a format which all players can play, not just WinDVD.

See here: MPEG-4 Hardware encoder thread

[MonsterHTPC]

Driver support for conexant would be great, think that is the chipset that is in the yuan? Using a half height expansion card would allow me to drop into a price range below 700 for a small form factor case and a starter PVR.

Keep up the great work guys. Love all the new stuff in SS.

Off Topic:

It's wierd how people latch on to stuff. Was showing another HTPC to someone and they didn't oooo and ahhh at hundreds of hours of media storage, ability to play games, Clear picture quality better than their cable box when I showed them the comparison, nor easily programmable remote and an easy interface tha was waf friendly NOOO!!! this was the comment "cool a search feature? really? let me try *types american chopper* Wow! look honey it found an episode of american chopper when i typed it, thats amazing" . . . Sheesh non tech types