Help a newbie!! I have an ati hdtv tuner and....

am trying to figure out how to set it up and get it running on windows media center 2005. please help ive been at it for hours.
thanks

its cool i need to rant on too...who knew it would be so frustrating to install a tv tuner. im shocked that you had problems 3yrs ago and to this day ati has done nothing to solve that issue. i should just do what you did and go somewhere else. thanks

You need to download the HDTV Wonder driver for MCE from the ATI website. They have a special driver. If you install the ones off the CD, and install ATI's media application, then it won't work with Windows MCE. What I list here is reminiscent of what I went through. Your experiences may vary.

So, step 1: Uninstall the drivers you've installed from the CD, as well as the ATI media center app if you installed that.

You may need to go into the registry, and wipe clean anything to do with the HDTV Wonder settings (but not an ATI graphics card if you have one!).

Step 2: Install the MCE-compliant HDTV Wonder driver from the ATI web site. You can also get it from the Windows Update site, but only if it figures out you need it.

Step 3: You will probably need to go through a couple of cycles of reboot - find hardware - install drivers - repeat. As long as the MCE driver is on there, though, you'll be able to get it to work eventually.

No, it's not a smooth install. But you can get it to work with some persistence.

Other notes:

- you must install a separate analog tuner (no, the one on the HDTV Wonder doesn't count) for MCE to recognize your HDTV tuner. Otherwise, MCE will act like you don't have any tuners. Or... you can use a hacked driver - check on thegreenbutton for more info - that allows you to use just your HDTV card for both analog and digital TV. The ATI site talks about the analog tuner incompatibility a bit if you look around.

- you can get the remote control working, and it's not bad. In fact, the wireless is kinda nice vs. the line-of-site IR remotes. When you install its driver, be sure not to install the ATI media application, or you may lose MCE compatibility.

Good luck. You can get it to work if you work at it. If you struggle, post back and I'll look up and post the list of devices and drivers I have running. Not accessible at the moment.[/list][/i]