Hybrid TV Tuner Question

[Bobmuhthol]

Woot did me right and sold the ATI TV Wonder 600 recently for $25 so I grabbed one. The quality is fine, and the included antenna picks up channels fine, including HD, so I'm cool with that as long as I don't have a cable feed. The problem comes in when I use the tuner on my desktop, in a room where I have cable and would like to take advantage of that. The Catalyst software bundled with the device and Windows Media Center both only allow 1 mode of scanning, analog or digital / cable or antenna. Thus, I'm only getting NTSC channels with cable, and ATSC channels with the antenna, but those same ATSC channels are transmitted in the cable as well.

The question: what software do I need to get in order to utilize this hybrid motherfucker?

And for clarification, I am 100% positive that I can access the ATSC channels over coax because my TV does it all the time (e.g., 25-1 [25.1] for HD FOX). I'm not using a cable box.

[phantasm]

The PC doesn't have the answer to EVERY question man.

[BigWorm]

Woot did me right and sold the ATI TV Wonder 600 recently for $25 so I grabbed one. The quality is fine, and the included antenna picks up channels fine, including HD, so I'm cool with that as long as I don't have a cable feed. The problem comes in when I use the tuner on my desktop, in a room where I have cable and would like to take advantage of that. The Catalyst software bundled with the device and Windows Media Center both only allow 1 mode of scanning, analog or digital / cable or antenna. Thus, I'm only getting NTSC channels with cable, and ATSC channels with the antenna, but those same ATSC channels are transmitted in the cable as well.

The question: what software do I need to get in order to utilize this hybrid motherfucker?

And for clarification, I am 100% positive that I can access the ATSC channels over coax because my TV does it all the time (e.g., 25-1 [25.1] for HD FOX). I'm not using a cable box.


ATSC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_tuner) is digital broadcast TV. Digital Cable is QAM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAM_tuner). The ATI TV Wonder 600 (http://ati.amd.com/products/tvwonder600/USB/index.html) does not have a QAM tuner. Your TV sounds like it does have a tuner for unencrypted QAM, but you didn't give enough info to verify. The HD channels you think are ATSC on your TV are almost definitely QAM channels.

There is no software that can do what you want to do. Sorry dude.

[Bobmuhthol]

Son of a bitch, I forgot about QAM. Thanks.

My next retarded question, then, is whether there's a cable configuration that allows for both an antenna and cable to be connected to the tuner such that I would be able to choose which signal to use at a software level. This isn't a huge deal save for the convenience of switching the coax feed whenever I want to watch HD channels.

[Inspire]

I went and looked at purchasing one of these today. How happy are you with the one you purchased?

Anyone else have some good alternatives? I've been looking at buying a new TV for the office but I might be satisfied with something decent on one of my extra monitors.

[Bobmuhthol]

I'm very happy with it but that is also because it comes with an antenna so I can watch TV anywhere with my laptop. Unsurprisingly, the digital signals come in a lot clearer than analog cable. A big issue to take into account is the display; monitors tend to be less impressive than TVs with color quality, contrast ratio, etc., so a TV will usually display a noticeably better picture (my monitor isn't the greatest so the picture is grainy, not a fault of the tuner -- I even used it to display on my TV and it looks normal). If you've already got a monitor and just want TV, though, it's certainly a much cheaper alternative.