Richard Vanderhurst

 

The leader in Television tuner technology up till now has been ATI’s Television Wonder Elite. Tuner cards featuring the Theater 650 Pro chip will be available from makers like MSI and Sapphire, and those products should range between $100 to $150. The new chip offers enough of a lift to image quality that TV-on-your-PC fans should give it an intense look ; just know that CableCard technology for Computers is anticipated to hit next year.

The Theater 650 Pro boasts a new video decoder together with many picture-quality tweaks and performance enhancements. Some of the highlights include support for NTSC, Chum , and SECAM signals, plus digital Television thru ATSC and DVB-T ( the EU digital standard ), and hardware MPEG-2 encoding to spare your CPU from doing all of the heavy lifting. Watching the standard Television signal, as well as sending DVD test photographs from a set-top DVD player, we saw proof of the enhancements ATI made to the Theater 650 Pro.

On the standard moire pattern test screen, we managed to see fine, detailed lines that were blurred out on last year’s Theater 550 chip. Still, no Television tuner for a PC–the Theater 650 Pro included–provides the image quality you get with even the most simple cable-box-to-TV hookup. Many clients will select to use Windows XP Media Center Edition as their front end, and our Theater 650 reference board hooked right up to the Media Center OS with no issues.

The Theater 650 Pro is also compatible with Media Center alternatives like Cyberlink PowerCinema and Snapstream’s Beyond Television . Really, a new version of that software, Beyond Television 4.3, is launching on Thursday, June eight, and Snapstream is touting its Theater 650 Pro compatibility as a major selling point. Recording Television on a Computer is a hard subject that frequently leaves casual users either confused with the variety of hardware and software decisions out there or else unhappy with the less-than-stellar results of their recordings.

When standard-definition wire signals are sent to your Computer , the final image quality goes from just OK to downright hideous, even with a card powered by the wonderful ATI Theater 650 Pro. Over-the-air HD recording is better but needs a compatible Television tuner card and the forbearance to hang an antenna out of your window and find an HD signal. Naturally, all this is predicted to switch sometime next year when new Computers are CableCard compatible

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