DIAMOND ATI Theater HD 750 USB TVW750USB

Comment:
Nice unit works great for the price. the drivers that came with the unit worked fine for me with windows 7 on four computers. However I do not use any of the software that comes with it. I use windows media center for watching OTA broadcast . Its a better fit with all these TV tuners. There is a special hack available on the internet to get the tuners to work for canadian OTA broadcast  in media center. But once it working it works like a charm.. As for driver issues, I didn't have any..I would use the ones that come in the box. I try other ones from ATI site never did get any of them to work. Just I side note I'm buying a second one in a few days. If you want a better quality built unit, you buy the hauppage unit at almost 3 times the price.

Comment:
i wouldnt buy another of theese as setup for this device was very bad first 2 installs had errors then after i finaly got it installed i had to track down updated drivers to get it to work at all and still had issues with the digital part after that. i wouldn't recomend this to anyone.

Comment:
Cheap, works fine.Driver are a pain to install, you have to get the ATI driver for the Tuner and keep the Diamond driver for the remote.Will hang sometime, you have to close application, unplug and plug to recover.

Comment:
I researched for the most appropriate USB tuner to work with my hobby OTA (antenna) setup, and this ATI TVW750 is what I came up with. Specifically, to use primarily with a lowly Toshiba 1.2 ghz Duo laptop running Windows 7x64 Home Premium. The tuner installed but not without some issues. For one, the driver-set on the CD is somewhat outdated, so I went to the ATI/AMD website and downloaded a newer version. This worked much better with my Windows edition. Next was to load the ATI tuner program (Total Media). It worked well first time -- it's quite user-friendly and detailed. It also comes with a signal strength meter. Then I tried loading the alternative Windows Media Center with the tuner. It took several hours of working with that combo to finally get WMC to work properly with this tuner -- WMC would only identify the tuner as 'analog' and of course not work in this new digital tv world. After much more research it seems that WMC does not yet support 'digital' reception in Canada. So after re-inputting a local US location the device was finally identified by WMC and continued to setup properly. However, none of that that was a problem with the Total Media software. It's interesting that the Total Media found more channels than WMC, and I can only surmise that this software was written as the best compliment for this tuner. So to me TM works satisfactory as an all in one TV/PVR package.Note: I have not hooked up and tested a cable box to the the tuner as that was not the intended use of the purchase. The enclosed portable antenna is not that good of product. Don't waste your time with it, but instead try a better larger antenna (or powered indoor type) for the purpose -- mine is a roof top Channel Master 4228 with preamp. I will be using the laptop with this tuner to refine my adjustments of the antenna (for use with the main plasma HDTV).

Comment:
I bought this about a month or so ago. This little doodad works out-of-the-box on Windows 7 (at least, assuming you have an internet connection so it can grab the drivers) in Windows Media Center, which is the easiest way to use it. You can also install ATI's Avivo drivers which include an mpeg-2 encoder which will work with other software (e.g. Media Portal).When software tries to start the thing up, it tends to temporarily freeze, which is annoying; I don't know if this is a normal thing with tuners. It takes about 6 seconds to go from clicking "Live TV" in WMC to watching it. It takes about 4 seconds max to change channels.As with most (all?) of these USB tuners, this guy lacks hardware encoding. You probably have to step up to a more expensive PCI tuner to get that. This doesn't really seem to be an issue these days; as long as you're pulling in ATSC (which is all that's left for OTA in Canada and the US), you won't benefit from it at all. You're already pulling in an mpeg-2 feed, a hardware encoder doesn't do anything. So CPU usage is very very low with this tuner when recording. You can use this safely on a gaming computer with no appreciable loss of performance (aside from the hard drive hit, and about 50-70 MB that WMC takes in the background).Ditch the antenna that comes with it. It's completely useless. I can just barely pull in one channel with it; with a better one, I can get the strong Vancouver signals despite being on the "wrong side" of my apartment building. ATSC reception has been terrific since the analog->digital transition.I had issues with my last Diamond tuner (an earlier model). This one has been flawless thusfar, which is pretty good for something this decently priced.