ATI Technologies has sold PCI-based TV tuners, and graphics cards with TV-tuning capabilities, for several years. Its most recent such products make TV on a PC look better than ever before--but they're still no match for the real thing, TV on a TV.
I looked at ATI's TV Wonder Elite, a $149 PCI analog TV-tuner card that you install alongside your existing AGP or PCI Express graphics board. It uses ATI's Theater 550 Pro video processor, which incorporates a hardware MPEG-2 encoder, a 3D comb filter, and a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (most cards use converters with 10 or fewer bits); all of these features are supposed to improve video quality.
I also tried ATI's All-In-Wonder X800XT, a $499 graphics card that provides the company's best AGP-based graphics processing, in part thanks to 256MB of video RAM and a 16-pipeline 3D architecture. It also has a TV tuner, but MPEG-2 encoding is performed with software. Both cards offer FM-radio tuners and remote controls that use radio frequencies, not infrared, to issue commands. Neither can bring in HDTV signals; for that, you need ATI's HDTV Wonder.
The TV Wonder Elite ships with an ATI-specific version of CyberLink's PowerCinema 3 software, which allows you to watch, pause, and record live TV and FM radio. The interface uses big text, visible across a room, so you could conceivably use the board in a computer hooked to a television. The card is also compatible with Windows Media Center Edition, though, so you could bypass PowerCinema and use the Media Center interface.
Channel Surfing in Slo-Mo
Bypassing PowerCinema might be a good idea, because in this setup the application is dog-slow. It starts up slowly and then requires that you select the TV tuner, which took as long as 15 seconds to get going on my system. But changing channels is the most aggravating: When I held my finger down on the arrow button on my keyboard, PowerCinema got through only 23 channels in 60 seconds (using the included remote was equally bad). ATI says that the hardware MPEG-2 encoding introduces some delay, but that PowerCinema's buffering of the video also adds to it.
For comparison, I dragged out my nine-year-old Apple PowerMac 7600, which has an ATI Xclaim VR graphics card and an external Xclaim TV-tuner box; that combination changed 173 channels in a minute--more than seven times quicker than the TV Wonder Elite. That's not progress.
At least the video the TV Wonder Elite displayed looked pretty good--by TV-tuner card standards, anyway. Viewed on a CRT computer monitor, the color and contrast range looked quite good too, and I never saw stuttering of any kind. Still, the video appeared a little blocky, a bit blurry, even under PowerCinema's best settings. Overall, it was no match for a real television.
ATI doesn't provide any sort of television listing service with the TV Wonder Elite, and PowerCinema is strictly an interface app with no program listings, so you'll have to look up program times yourself to schedule recordings--not exactly TiVo-level ease of use.
Gaming Card Does Everything
ATI's All-In-Wonder X800XT is replete with toys. In addition to its formidable gaming capabilities, it has a DVI connector and a VGA connector (you can connect two monitors at the same time), plus an analog TV tuner, an FM radio, and an incredible array of input connectors, both on the card itself and on three separate breakout boxes--one for inputs, another for outputs, and another that adds component-video-out so you can connect the card to an HDTV set. We did not subject the card to our gaming frame-rate tests, but we'd expect its performance to be similar to that of the X800XT Platinum Edition we tested last year.
As with earlier All-In-Wonder cards, the All-In-Wonder X800XT relies on ATI's MultiMedia Center for television and FM-radio tuning. The utility has components that can play CD and MP3 audio, as well as play DVDs and video CDs; it also comes with Gemstar's Guide Plus TV listings. The components work adequately, but they're all separate--if you're watching TV and you decide you want to watch a DVD, you must shut down the TV application and start up the one for DVDs. They don't take as much time to load as PowerCinema does, but the delay is still an annoyance.
On the upside, the All-In-Wonder X800XT changes channels more than twice as quickly as the TV Wonder Elite--about 50 channels in a minute. That still doesn't seem terribly fast, but the speed isn't nearly the issue it is with the TV Wonder Elite.
However, the image quality isn't as good as the Elite's. The image is grainier and fuzzier--text in particular looks less sharp, and colors bleed a little more. But overall, it isn't hugely inferior.
The Guide Plus listings help with scheduling: Simply right-click on a program to set it up for recording. But you must download current listings manually, and the system won't record if the PC is turned off.
TV in Transition
Of ATI's numerous TV-tuner card options, the TV Wonder Elite seems one of the poorer options--at least, until ATI adds a listings guide and dramatically improves the channel-changing speed. Television is a secondary feature on the All-In-Wonder X800XT, but it still does a pretty good job of that.
Image quality looks good; channel-changing speed is extremely lethargic.
List: $149
Current prices (if available)
www.ati.com
Upper-echelon graphics card provides pretty good TV features.
List: $499
Current prices (if available)
www.ati.com
