Hi All, Just bought and tried the voodoo tv fm card for £49 GB. Er...I have to say its not very good, the box looks good, but something is definately wrong. My Abit kt7-A raid board didnt like it, IRQ's all over the place. Took me 4 hours to get it working, and even then it couldnt capture properly, it only has 3 capture resolutions. It doesnt even come close to an ATI card. Overall, if you just want to watch TV or Videos, then its adequate. Speaking of which, I've heard theres a new ATI TV Wonder USB on the way out.

Just my 2cts.

-- Andy (andy@snes.freeserve.co.uk), May 11, 2001

Answers

I agree the installtion can be trouble. On one of my PCs it was easy but on another I had to reserve an irq (ok not really that much trouble)

the resolution issue is a problem whcih can apparently be solved with new drivers but since 3dfx are no more I'm not sure if the correct drivers can be found (the ones on their site still dont give vcd res)

however, if I capture with Virtual Dub and use a custom format in it the quality is excellent at up to 704x576 (on a P4 1.7ghz cpu)

the only problem here is that you need to use the composite or s-vid from another souce (eg vhs) The tuner just doesn't seem to work in any other program other than the 3dfx visual reality.

Also, for real time software mpeg1 capture, this is the best I've seen. It uses Ligos GoMotion engine to encode realtime

i.m.h.o. much better than winVCR or PowerVCR

If you want to spend a lot choose something else but if you want something under £45 try finding one of these. As they are no longer being produced and 3dfx have been bought out by Nvidia you can find some end of stock cards very cheap. Mine cost me £30 in a GAME store. They are increasingly hard to find though.

also - for mp3 fm recording you will need a patch file and reg code. look at http://www.3dxtreme.org/ forum for help finding it

-- Joey (rathernotsay@thanksanyway.nz), June 28, 2001.