ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner: AMD and Dell Bring CableCARD to PCs

The OCUR Experience

What about the OCUR experience itself? As you can guess, when it's working, the TV Wonder DCT works just like any other TV tuner - the only difference being that you can now watch absolutely any channel you've subscribed to thanks to CableCARD. Watching digital vs. analog channels is seamless; the tuner had no problem switching between analog to digital to digital HD channels and back in any order. Once the CableCARD is properly set up, you never even know it's there.

Given that OCUR stands for Open Cable Uni-directional Receiver, you obviously only get one way communication to the cable network. On Demand and network guides aren't available, though the latter isn't an issue as Vista's program guide is easily as good as any other electronic program guide available.

The key phrase from the top paragraph unfortunately is "when it's working", because the reason that the ATI TV Wonder DCT isn't shipping is that it still has some major bugs that need to be worked out. The ATI TV Wonder DCT we previewed isn't a finished product, despite being "ready" for over a year now. The problem is that the TV Wonder DCT isn't a standalone product; rather, it is simply one piece of a much larger puzzle that extends far beyond the PC that the device is attached to.

By far the most annoying problem we encountered during our preview was that occasionally we wouldn't be able to tune to a channel. The problem usually happened when switching between an SD channel on digital cable to an HD channel; instead of the HD channel just popping up when we'd select it, we were greeted either with a black screen or a still frame of the HD channel. After several seconds Vista would give us an error stating that it did not detect a TV signal and that we should check our hardware or call our cable provider. We couldn't come up with a real resolution to this problem; sometimes we would have to reboot the system and reset the TV Wonder DCT, while other times we simply needed to change channels and try again before it would work.

We saw this error a lot

We suspected that it might have been a signal strength issue, however after one day when the problem was at its worst (tuning to HD channels was impossible - we couldn't watch any HDTV on the system) it seemed to just go away, only to return a few days later. We're not sure if there were any fixes done on Time Warner's end that alleviated the problem for the period of time when the system worked flawlessly.

This one popped up a few times

AMD is aware of the problem and it assured us that the TV Wonder DCT would not ship until the TV signal bug was resolved. At this point AMD couldn't give us an exact answer as to the cause of the problem, although there are a number of potential culprits (cable network, signal strength, and hardware driver being prime candidates).

More bugs

The TV signal bug itself really accented the difficulty of deploying a product like the TV Wonder DCT. AMD made the hardware, Microsoft wrote the driver, CableLabs defined the specification, and a variety of companies own and operate the networks that the hardware will work on. To make things even worse, each and every cable network is slightly different - creating a myriad of potential causes for any one bug. We've all had to deal with the joys of working with a cable provider to diagnose cable TV problems; now toss in diagnosing PC problems to the mix. It's like trying to get cable internet support all over again, and hopefully "unplug your router" won't be an early step in the diagnostic tree when it comes to OCUR setups.