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HDTV On Your PC - ATi's HDTV Wonder
Spinnerbait writes "ATi is getting their new High Def capable HDTV Wonder ready for release soon and there is a preview of the card over at HotHardware. It will be an add-in PCI card that will be bundled with their All In Wonder cards initially and eventually be sold as a stand alone product. High Def on a nice 23" Flat Panel... time to drool."
From this article it looks like the HDTV All-In-Wonder card won't have any useful video input sockets on the card and there's no mention of any external connector box.
:(
I really want a decent means for connecting things like games consoles to my PC monitor. All the VGA boxes out there just give horrid blurry pictures because they double the scanlines of the picture. I wish someone would do a card with component or SCART inputs.
As much as I hate to rain on your Linux zealot parade, you do realize that TVTime uses the *DLLS* from dScaler, a Windows program, to provide the deinterlacing, right? Just because it's for Windows doesn't mean it's awful.
-matt
You are living a couple of years in the past. There are satellite TV services (Voom.com) that broadcast 30+ HDTV channels, and HDTVs aplenty in the stores. Copy protection has also been standardized.
About the only reason to delay purchasing now is that prices are dropping fairly rapidly. Intel has entered the HDTV silicon market and is expected to drive costs of LCOS sets down by $1000 over the next year.
You don't need the ATI card anyway. There's a UK-based outfit called Nebula Electronics who've been making HD-capable digital TV cards since late 2002, so you're all set for when HDTV broadcasts finally begin. The software is of reasonable quality and the support miles ahead of ATI. Here in Australia, where there's at least some HDTV broadcasts, we've been reaping the benefits of these (and competing DVB cards) for for quite some time now.
The ATI card wouldn't even work in the UK anyway, since it's based on the American ATSC standard. I'm not actually sure what all the hubbub over this card is about--Hauppauge already beat them to it. I guess ATI's size means they get the publicity by default.
In the UK you use the DVB standard, which is what much of the rest of the world has also settled on. This is the standard on which the Nebula and other cards are based.