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The Manual
The manual sucks too. A lot of times companies can slide by with the fact that there's little information that actually needs to be given: this is such a product. Yet the fact remains that such oddities as "…It caused by resource of motherboard. As we know, the resource of slot that near CPU is the same with other device that on board of motherboard. (sound card, modem, VGA…)." While one can usually make out what they're trying to say, it's obvious that their translator did a horrible job
Installation
This part was painless. I've never had a simpler install "except for my ViRGEdx video card, which is now so old and was at one point so standard that the optimal drivers are installed when the OS is installed). The only issue I had was that it was tight-fitting trying to get the card into the slot, due to the ports sticking out the back, as they were so high up on the card so as nearly to stop one from being able to slide the card far enough back to slide it into the PCI slot. The manual says that the two potentially offending ports could be taken off, but I found this to be difficult to the point of failure - I simply couldn't do it. But I got it in anyway, and the software install was done in short order.
The Software
The included software is rather straightforward and should be self-explanatory, except perhaps for the buttons at the bottom which, unfortunately, do not have a name-description next to them. The good news is that they shouldn't have to be used that often, as they are used for the varying TV options, shown below:
There are a number of other options, such as brightness contrast, etc, though those are extremely basic and straightforward. The unfortunate thing about the included software is that it doesn't have the ability to record into mpeg1, 2, or Divx, nor was there any equivalent form of audio compression (such as mp3) available. While the ATI TV Wonder VE doesn't claim to have the aforementioned features, it does, and that makes a world of difference to those who record from TV.
>> Usage/Radio
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