typical S3 never managed to get anything right after the Savage 4 series of chips.

I would now be very weary on HDTV tuners. ATI's HDTV Wonder, for example, can ONLY get HDTV over the air. It will not allow you to get an HDTV satellite signal or get HDTV cable broadcasts. Read the fine print.

Not sure this POS deserved a photo on the frontpage .. just a little dialup whine

This S3 stuff reminds me about an old joke:
Communist leader speech "Alhough we are on the verge of the disaster, we managed to make a step forward".

Why don't they market these cards in third world countries?

Ya know, you could have summarized "S3 delivers another turd," and it would have gotten the point across equally as well. ;)

#18 So I guess it's a lot harder to put STEREO sound on a TV tuner? LOL! Seriously that was a huge mistake on thier part to that out. I mean you can even go out now and pick up a cheapie USB TV Tuner that has at least stereo sound on it.

I think what makes it hard for companies like S3 and xgi and even matrox is that because they have been out of the running, ati and nvidia have had years more experience and R+D behind them - for drivers and hardware. It will take a lot of work to get any video card company up to the expertise of those two.....ever since DX8 it must have been a lot more difficult to write drivers because of pixel shaders etc...and develop the hardware too.

This reminds me. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can surf the web on my hdtv? It does have a dvi port. Do I just need a dvi cable?

#11, because both ATI and NVidia can make better and (more importantly) cheaper low end cards. This is just natural in that they can use both older designs and/or inventory to supply the very bottom level. And for the "normal" low end demand, they can tweak their current designs to use small amounts of die space, meaning they can produce new, slow but full featured, cards for much less than any other company which is trying to get started with their own new design. The economies of scale, plus the fact that they have the investment in the technology that makes it almost easy to put out a variant with snipped pipelines, mostly to save production costs as a result of the smaller die. So the third world countries care most about price, not quality, but ATI and Nvidia can and do still beat S3 (and Kryo, and Matrox) in quality, features AND price. In fact they beat Intel in that regard... Intel's only advantage is they can embed their silicon right into an Intel chipset.

TechReport should do an article about building a PVR system. One system for plain ol' stardard TV and one system that can handle HDTV.

I've often thought about building one, but I'm not really sure where the market is for building one that handles HDTV. Nor am I very familiar with what's available for getting TV signals in and out of a computer.

That's a shame. I keep hoping that S3 will be able to get back in the game, especially now that Matrox has retreated to a few small niche markets. But continued fumbles like this do not inspire a great deal of confidence that they will ever be able to do so.

Is the one you got supposed to be a prototype, a reference design, a production card, what? It sure doesn't sound very polished.

What many card manufacturers aren't realizing is that these cards need to be half height so that they'll fit in slim line computer cases. Just like the cases that EVERYONE wants to use for set top boxes.

Typical S3 though. How many ways can we screw up a product.

So what does that leave us with? ATI and... Hauppauge??? as the major vendors with quality products for computer TV tuning (and recording)?

Did I read that right? "The video decoder won't capture in high definition, but it can handle component input."

Component input is pretty stinking cool. It's a shame that the card is so lacking everywhere else. But at least this gives me hope that nvidia or ati might not be too far behind with component inputs.