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ATI Graphic Board Goes Wild With TV

All-in-Wonder 128 will offer a Digital VCR with plenty of slick video tricks.

By Dan Littman, PCWorld   

For you couch-potato rebels, the All-in-Wonder 128 comes with its own tuner and can send a television signal--or digital video from your PC--to either the PC monitor or to your television.

Digital-video capabilities range from simply displaying DVD movies to support for digital-television tuners from Sony and other vendors.

You can use the All-in-Wonder 128 to capture an analog video stream, digitize it, and save it on your hard disk. The Digital VCR feature lets you schedule the graphics board to capture specific shows, and it can read closed-caption text and begin recording when it detects words that you've programmed it to track. For example, news hounds who work late could come home to a digital copy of 60 Minutes--if your PC has enough hard disk space to store it--or the system could simply start saving for 3 minutes every time the word "Iraq" appear.

Another feature, called TV Magazine, grabs a show's transcript along with periodic thumbnail images taken from the video stream and saves them in a format designed to be printed.

The All-in-Wonder 128's capabilities go beyond automatic functions. When you're watching television, the Channel Surf feature shows you thumbnails of numerous channels, so instead of clicking blindly you can keep track of what's coming along and switch when something catches your interest. The board can cache up to 2 minutes of the video stream and replay it without saving to disk. It also lets you zoom in on an image. And it can write digital video to a CD or DVD recorder, or analog video to an ordinary VHS tape.

Graphic Details

As your basic graphics board, the All-in-Wonder 128 should be no slouch, accelerating both 2D and 3D graphics. ATI says that the board will render 32-bit color as fast as older boards render 16-bit color, and can slap game graphics onto the computer screen at more than 60 frames per second. (PC World has not yet tested performance claims.) Maximum resolution is 1920 by 1200 pixels for 2D and 1920 by 1440 for 3D. The board will be available in both PCI and AGP versions.

The All-in-Wonder 128 will ship with 16MB of memory for the reseller market in March and with 32MB of memory for the retail market sometime in the second quarter. ATI estimates that the reseller models will cost $250 and the retail models $300. The reseller package will include MGI's VideoWave video-editing software and MotoRacer 2; the retail bundle has not been determined. Both boards are designed for systems that run on a 200-MHz Pentium MMX or faster processor.