Okay, my mom got me a thingy. It's got metal balls which you pop onto a springy surface, and it's kinda like a skeetball (sp?) thing, you try to get points. I'll probably take it to work for stress/comic relief.
My inlaws got me The West Wing: Season 2 DVDs. All I can say: YES!!!!! I'm watching it now on the DVD player (I would on my computer, but my third present has screwed up my computer's ability to play DVDs).
My best present, however, is from my wife. The ATI HDTV Wonder card. I've been drooling over the box every time I see it. Well... here's my review: (DTV = Digital tv, versus TV mode which is analog)
1. ATI *still* can't make a decent media center! My mother has an ATI TV Wonder LE or VE or somesuch card. Their MMC sucked then, it still sucks. You can't use the TV function when in the full screen "EasyView" or whatever mode - it switches out of that, and you can only use the remote in that mode, so the remote doesn't work for the TV part. The DTV part, however, works great. Good quality, you can switch channels, the full screen interface is rather good in my opinion, at least the parts that they've implemented (ie. no normal TV ability, or DVD playing ability, so most of the remote's buttons seem useless).
2. The antenna which it comes with sucks. There are many antenna amplifiers (well, technically they're signal amplifiers, but still) out there that will help ALOT. I live in East Aurora of the Denver, Colorado area. Thanks to a rather sucky and stupid city of Golden, there isn't a full-power antenna tower. Why? Because they thought it would cause cancer by reducing the number of TV towers from 2 or 3 down to just 1, and with lower-output signals. What are they smoking out there?!! Anyways, because of that, the local stations have to use low-powered transmitters from their studios. Which means that getting a good signal can SUCK. Anyways, with the amp I'm able to get more stations than without.
3. Some channels I can get video and audio (ie. normal operation): Channel 9.2 (9News Weather Plus), Channel 31.1 (Channel 31 from normal tv, in 720p!), and Channels 12.1, 12.2, and 12.3 (local PBS station times three). I like the PBS stations, actually.
4. Some channels I can only get audio on, and only sometimes: Channel 2.1, Channel 4.1 (VERY sporadically), Channel 9.1 (normal channel 9) and Channel 20.1 (Channel 20).
5. And JUST now MMC has decided to start crashing, AGAIN, when I run the DTV app. But the TV works now correctly. I am rather annoyed that ATI STILL can't get this right! Microsoft has made these things work (XP MCE), and they have NOT been in the field of desktop-TV type apps as long. Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition seems to work on my father in law's computer just fine. So now I have to do the reinstall all the apps in the right order dance and see if sacrificing a chicken or perhaps a lamb would work. ARGH!!!
6. Oh, and yes, you can record the HDTV. If you have a computer with a super high speed magic bus that sends the HD data down to your hard drive without killing your CPU. Point: My computer is an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ 2.19 GHz (Intel Equiv: 3 GHz according to HP). My computer could not keep up. And at that point, you can't use your computer, not even to open Task Manager to kill the app. Good thing you can always yank the power plug. Grrr.... At least recording normal TV works well and takes very little CPU (~5% for me). But for recording DTV, I have no clue what they want from your computer, but mine just doesn't have it.
*sigh*. Well, when it works, it IS cool. I really don't want to take it back, I've wanted HDTV for awhile. But ATI still needs to learn to make decent software. The hardware's good, no crashes of the OS or anything. But their software makes me want to gag. And while other software can access the normal TV functions (WinDVD creator will record from TV and all), the DTV isn't implented in a way that those programs can use. And in general the DTV parts of the driver seem to suck. I've played with this all last night and then a few hours this evening as well.
In short: I would NOT recommend this card to anyone. Unless you are DYING to get HDTV, you've done the research and know that your area has it, and even then, download everything from ATI, don't use the crap that comes on their packaged CD. And expect to have alot of problems getting it to work. The crashes of atimmc in particular are not something that one can do much about, because the program can't tell you what's actually wrong, just that it's not working. What, are they not checking their pointers in C and all?? I mean, there's no excuse for not giving a meaningful error message. Even just "Windows is telling me the driver's not loading", or somesuch. This is 2004, not 1995 after all.
(And yes, my computer EASILY meets all of the requirements, so that's not the issue.)
But, I plan to keep the card, when it works, it's cool. (Although I can't get in 9.1, 'cause then I could see West Wing in HDTV, which someday I will get working, and that's what's keeping me going on this.)
Marking this happy mood, although I'm also aggravated due to ATI.
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