Digital Trends

ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro

December 2nd, 2003 | by Jeff Fila

TV On Your Desktop
 

Using the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro is pretty straightforward and easy. Opening up the TV tuner or DVD player can be done with a click of the Remote Wonder or with a click of the mouse. 

The Remote Wonder operates on radio frequency so line-of-sight is not required, as it is with an infrared remote control. This is both a good and a bad thing. On the positive side, you can control your computer and All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro through walls and around corners. On the negative side, since all of your other remotes are likely to be IR, the Remote Wonder is not compatible as a learning remote. If you plan on using the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro in a home theater environment, be aware that you will have yet another remote control to deal with. 

ATI's Remote Wonder is a USB radio frequency remote control for your computer.

The remote does most functions you would expect from a TV remote control plus more. There is a navigation touch pad in the middle that allows you to move a mouse cursor around. This enables you to browse the web or use Windows applications with your remote. The default speed of the cursor is quite slow and most users may want to increase that. Unfortunately, the buttons are a bit finicky. Some times they just did not respond. At first, we thought that the volume and channel changing buttons do not function like most other remotes. To increase the volume, we had to repeatedly hit the button to get to the desired level, as opposed to being able to just hold the button down like on other remotes. The same went for changing of TV channels. If you want to go up or down several channels, you must repeatedly hit the button. This, however, seemed to fix itself because at the end of our testing, we were able to do this with no problem.

One other annoyance is that when you change channels, the sound comes in, drops out, and then comes back on each channel you change. This was constant and just to be sure, we tested this on two different sound cards and it happened on both.

EazyLook is ATI's home theater “front end.” It enables everything controlled by the ATI Remote Wonder to be easily seen at a distance or on a television. It's a clean interface and easy to use. Several buttons on the Remote Wonder are pre-programmed to access features of the ATI Multimedia Center and EazyLook. Several other buttons can be programmed to perform other functions. One annoyance we found however, was the default setting that makes EazyLook come up at the press of any button on the remote. This means that by default, if you are watching TV in a window and wish to change the channel, EazyLook will maximize your TV window at the press of any button, and then attempt to change the channel. Unfortunately, the first button press is not registered so if you typed “15” it would first maximize and then go to channel “5” instead. This “feature” can be turned off in the settings, but it is quite annoying to be set as a default. 

We experienced a few lockups of our test system while watching TV. This occurred when we were watching TV in a window and tried to change the channel or shut it down. Sometimes the TV would go full-screen with no audio. Our entire computer locked up and no matter what we tried we had to do a hard shutdown by holding down the power button on the case. Pressing esc or ctrl-alt-del didn't even work. This didn't happen all of the time, but enough for us to think of it an issue, especially since we lost several paragraphs of this very review.

The TV tuner can handle up to 125 channels of analog cable. This is fine, and more than adequate if you have basic cable. However, if you have digital or satellite cable, the usefulness of the product greatly diminishes. You can't tune in the extra digital TV channels beyond your cable company's basic offerings. 

As a comparison, Time-Warner Cable in Albany, NY, where the unit was tested offers 76 analog channels. The digital cable service and HBO package offers 181 channels plus over 20 digital music stations. Some of these channels are duplicates, but in essence, this means that there are more than 105 channels that the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro cannot tune in. It also cannot tune in HTDV broadcasts.

Now, we know enough to not expect this out of the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro, but consumers need to be aware that they won't be able to watch their HDTV or digital cable shows on this card. If you are planning on making an HTPC and making this the center of your home theater, keep this in mind. 

There are some innovative features on the TV side of the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro. One such feature is “Video Desktop.” This makes your TV the desktop background. Another feature called “ThruView” allows you to set the TV as your desktop or a translucent window in the background that can be seen through active applications. This enables you to view TV and work on applications at the same time. This is a must if you want to do both because, unfortunately, the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro does not support TV viewing on a second monitor. The two VGA outputs allow for dual-monitor computing, but you are unable to view TV on your second monitor — which would be the ideal location for TV if you are watching and trying to get some work done.

The All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro also includes Gemstar's GUIDE Plus+ TV listings software. The software downloads a week's worth of program listings and descriptions at a time. You can view your TV listings and plan your viewing schedule while still watching the TV in the top left corner of your screen. 

Working in conjunction with GUIDE Plus+ are the “personal video recorder” and TV on Demand features. Personal Video Recorder allows you to use your PC like a VCR or TiVo. You can program it to record shows, select the quality of the recordings and save them to your hard drive. You are also supposed to be able to save to a CD or DVD on the fly, although we did not try this feature. 

Programming to record is as easy as right clicking on a show and selecting “record.” You can record the current program you are watching with the VCR-like buttons on the Remote Wonder. The unit also features the ability to pause and rewind live TV. You can sort by programming type (sports, movies, news, etc) and even search by actor name or keywords. You can also take still screenshots of the TV broadcast with the push of a button. Screenshots are saved as .BMP images.

While GUIDE Plus+ can be useful, it also has a few quirks and bugs that can't be overlooked. The worst of these is watching TV while looking through your TV guide. The guide places a TV window in the top left corner of your screen to view the channel as you look at programming information. The TV changes channels when you click on another channel. Clicking on a program allows you to view a detailed description of the program. That is fine, but if you click on another time slot, the view in the TV window changes to that channel at that time slot. You'll want to click on other time slots in order to program to record a show in the future. Since you can't watch TV in the future, the TV window says “Not Currently Showing.” It would make much more sense if the program just continued to view the program that is currently on the channel. There is also no way of scrolling through the list of channels with the remote without repeatedly clicking it. A scroll-mouse feature would be a welcome addition.

GUIDE Plus+ could also benefit from a better schedule update. TV programming is downloaded from the Internet once a week. It's nice to have a week's worth of programming downloaded at a time, but you have to manually elect to download the programming info every week. Since you are going to be doing this every week, it would make sense for the program to be able to just do it automatically in the background.