ATI TV Wonder Pro on Fedora Core 4 Working Fine
Last night brought a nice surprise; I saw the ATI TV Wonder Pro posted on slickdeals.net for $5.00 after rebates and coupon. I decided to spring for one and pick it up in store. Circuit City is running a 24 minute guarantee campaign for Christmas and I ended up getting a $24 gift certificate on top of everything because they didn’t have my order ready 24 minutes after I placed it online! I was glad they had a sign with the terms on it though… the girl at the counter tried telling me that I had to wait 24 minutes after getting to the counter for the deal to be valid. Yeah right, that doesn’t make much sense! I pointed out the sign a few minutes later, she got the Manager and I got a gift card. 
At any rate, I got it home this morning (they didn’t actually even have it at that store after all - it only took them an hour of searching to figure that out) and plugged it in to find that the card has a major problem with audio / video sync under Windows XP Pro. The audio was probably off a full 1.5 seconds, which made watching it very annoying. I don’t have the most powerful box, a Dimension 3000, but it should have been plenty to keep things in sync, especially considering I didn’t have any other programs or tray apps running. I did find a few references] to the problem on ATI’s web site, which pointed me to a Microsoft bulletin, but Windows wasn’t really where I wanted to watch TV anyway. These days I am using this machine almost 100% in Linux. If you want to get this card to sync in Windows, it appears that you either need a new DLL driver fix that only Microsoft can hand out upon request, or a better sound card (I am using the on-board audio on my Dimension).
To my delight, I booted Fedora Core 4, added tvtime (yum install tvtime) and the thing just works, with synced audion and video! tvtime had the picture pretty dark, but with a few adjustments, this card works great; I basically have it running in a mostly stock Dimension 3000. I don’t plan to do any video capture with it any time soon, but if I do, I will post my experience with it. All in all, if you are looking for a cheap video card to just watch TV in Linux, I would have to recommend this one; the Hauppauge is much better from what I read, so you might want to explore that one if you have a little more dough. For $5 though, it was a darn good deal for Linux TV.
Filed under: Technology