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ATi HDTV Tuner For The PC Arrives
Chi-Energy writes "ATi has released their new HDTV Tuner card for the PC today, which allows
High Def broadcasts and cable content to be displayed on any PC monitor. It should be
is especially impressive on some of the new fast response time flat panels that
are on the market today.
HotHardware has a full review and showcase of the product here. The
good news is, with the supplied antenna, you can just grab local HDTV
programming right out of the air for free!"
From the article: "Known for their "TV Wonder" and "All-In-Wonder" series multimedia cards, ATI is a true pioneer in the industry, being one of the first to bring TV to the PC."
That's very interesting, given all those Amiga users who were using genlocks, VideoToasters, and whatnot to manipulate & display TV on their monitors back in 1990. I remember using my $35 garage sale genlock on my $150 Amiga 500 to use a live broadcast TV background for my desktop back before Windows had a desktop background!
It's also interesting given that the ATI tv capture cards SUCK. They don't do any mpeg encoding on the card, so if you want to capture and save to disk you can watch your CPU utilization shoot up. The cards made by Hauppage and others do hardware MPEG encoding too. You can even run multiple Hauppage cards in the same box to record multiple channels at once with very little CPU utilization. Having that CPU free means you can play DVDs, games, etc while recording.