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All-in-Wonder 9600 Pro Review
VL writes "From synthetic, to real-world game benchmarks. TV capture, DVD playback, and 2D/3D image quality... we covered all the bases with a review of All in Wonder 9600 Pro."
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AIW has been a nice low cost video swiss army knife. If I weren't so happy with my ATI Radeon 9000 (and ATI's support of it with drivers!) I would get one of these.
They saw that HardOCP pointed out the same thing today and had to get even.
C:\>
http://gatos.sourceforge.net/supported_cards.php
at video capture/tv tuner cards are supported by gatos. the 9700 is listed as "support on the way thanks to ATI", but nothing on the 9600. you might want to check the mail list archives or post to the list to see. i have aiw 128 pro and it works nicely w/ linux, though i haven't tried capture in a year or so. it was rough at the time i last tried it. i just want to easily record vcd compliant mpeg video from the input card. (via cron if possible). maybe that functionality exists now.
I think the card is great and has a ton of functionability. But when the time came for me to buy a PVR card, I had to skip on this one in favor of the hauppauge wintv pvr 350 PCI card and a seperate video card solution.
I had to do this dasterdly deed due to the current state of linux driver support (ie lacking). Is anyone developing drivers for this or is ATI creating a too fast of moving target. Does anyone have any alternative solutions?
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
My capture board of choice..
I'm currently on my 3rd AIW ATI card. Good bang for the buck and darn good perfomance.
I've used other boards like Osprey but ATI's gear always seems to do it better, and tends to have better bundled software and 3rd party support.
Up until recently, The Mach chipset in older AIW's was 'ok' for gaming. But I wasnt much into gaming. I preferred em for capturing.
But now.. They have a great cap card AND gaming card!
I'd say ATI today, is what Voodoo was a few years ago..
Here is a nice list:
i d= 33992
http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?s=&thread
I'm just getting a dual-dvi ti4600 from gainward...
ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro: Like the AIW 9800 Pro, this mainstream offering supports DX9 and has some great A/V capabilities. It also has a couple of unique features that separates itself from the rest of the AIW line.
Date: November 21, 2003
Manufacturer: ATI
Written By: Hubert Wong
Price: $205 USD
The All-In-Wonder series have been a great success for ATI. Recently, they've been coupling some great TV-Tuning functionality with a modern VPU. This is a far cry from early All-In-Wonders (AIW) where the VPU was based on a handicapped version of their fastest card.
Another smart decision was releasing different variants of the AIW cards, each targeting a different market segment. The AIW VE was aimed at the budget market, where potential users may not have an AGP slot available. This AIW lacked a remote, and used a two year old VPU, but it was priced very low, and the multimedia aspect matched the top-end AIW 9700 Pro (now discontinued in favour of the faster 9800 Pro VPU). The AIW 9000 was another mainstream part, but supported DirectX 8.1 gaming. This card suffered something of "middle child syndrome" and didn't seem to get as much fanfare as the other AIW parts. The AIW 9800 Pro is ATI's current top dog, matching their quality multimedia features with their most modern VPU (until the XT came out).
Though the VPUs (and hence, the price) differed, what all three cards had in common was the TV-Tuner and the Theater 200 Video Processing Engine (VPE). Another thing they had in common, was the inability to output to dual CRT monitors. Considering that multimedia authors live and die with multi-displays, this was quite an omission in the AIW series. Today, we'll be looking at the AIW 9600 Pro, which has everything current AIWs have, and includes DirectX 9 support, Theater 200, FM-Radio (a new feature), and the previously MIA dual CRT display support.
Specifications
You can grab ATI's full specifications from their page, but I thought it would be good to outline a few important features.
TV-ON-DEMAND: Exactly as it sounds. With the AIW 9600 Pro, you can record your favorite programs, and pause live TV (playing it back whenever you want) directly on to your hard drive. The Gemstar GUIDE Plus+ is a software and web based application that works much like a TiVO's TV guide.
FM-ON-DEMAND: New to the AIW series is the AIW 9600 Pro's ability to listen to and record live radio. This works by attaching an antenna to the IO panel on the card. Unfortunently, this antenna isn't included, and you'll need to pick up your own.
THRUVIEW: Like other AIW cards, you can view TV through a translucent overlay on your desktop. This will allow you to work on your primary window, while still being able to watch TV. In theory, this sounds great, but I found it too distracting to use in a practical environment.
Remote Wonder: A fully wireless remote, that works by radio frequency, rather than infrared. That means the signal will pass through most walls found in homes, and at a range of about 30 feet. We reviewed it here, so check that review for our full thoughts.
EAZYLOOK: Also known as the "10 foot interface". An issue with past ATI TV-Tuning based setups was the interface was too small to read on an actual television set. Add the typically low resolution of TVs, and you can see the problems. EAZYLOOK uses a much friendlier and simplified menu, and the font size is much larger, making it easier to use.
MulTView: This is a feature that will enable dual TV tuner capabilities including Picture-in-Picture and independent channel surfing. Want to watch one channel, while recording another? You couldn't do it before, but now you can, so long as you have an additional ATI TV Wonder. Hopefully, this is something ATI can integrate into one card in the future.
DirectX 9: The AIW 9600 Pro offers full DX9 support.
The ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro
Unlike earlier ATI products, the shipping boxes are squarer now, as opposed to
They also have a very good Linux forum for thrashing out ATI issues. Without them I would have never known about the schneider-digital drivers for my graphics card and would have been stuck with with an older version of XFree86 or no 3D acceleration. Thankfully the official ATI drivers seem to have gone "legit" now.
I have the TV Wonder VE, which is essentially the TV tuner part of this card (well it turns out to be more complicated than that, but for argument's sake).
The applications for watching and recording TV shows suck. Real bad. I have the latest version from their website too.
The best program I encountered was Snapstream, and it works with the card reviewed in this article. But it uses ACCESS and Jet to store tv shows, and can you guess what happened 3x before my trial period was over? That's right, corrupt database.
One further note, these cards will NOT work with Myth TV, the linux option. The TV Wonder series does work with Myth, though.
HDTV support will be limited in capture cards for some time, and I'll explain why:
HDTV is sent in a MPEG-2 format, so if you can get the raw transport stream, you don't have to do any fancy encoding. So in theory, an HDTV capture card is less complicated than a traditional NTSC/PAL capture card. Unfortunately, there are several different standards for encoding the transport stream. For broadcast television, the standard is ATSC, and you can get several ATSC tuner cards, including one specifically for Linux. For cable TV, the standard is QAM, which applies to all digitial cable, not just HDTV. There are currently no QAM capture cards, and the minute they enter the market, the cable companies will start encrpyting the channels (some already are). Eventually, you should be able to get a QAM card that is cable addressable, so it will essentially be your set-top box in a card.
Oh, and I have no idea about how satellite encodes HDTV, though I assume that like cable, it uses the same method as with regular digital channels (they're all MPEG).
Perhaps someday someone will develop a card that takes a full decoded HDTV signal and re-encodes it into MPEG for you, but that would take a lot of processing power. (I heard one estimate that the work required is roughly the equivalent of a 6GHz processor--I read it on the Internet, so it must be true.)
Check out Matrox's Parhelia series of cards. They are technically tri headed as the 2nd DVI connector forks off to two 15pin VGA connectors.
Expensive though at 350 or so. Yes there is linux support.
Matt