The ATI Theater 650 Pro arrives
The latest TV tuner card from the Canadian company best known for its VGA controllers will be available soon.
ATI Technologies has announced the completion of the Theater 650 Pro video processor for PCs, which can be used to receive both analog and digital TV broadcasts. The new chipset promises full hardware acceleration for PVR (Personal Video Recodring) tasks and also supports ATI Avivo technology. On the software side, the newcomer has the support of the all-new Catalyst Control Center, which provides an easy-to-use PVR interface and allows us to save our recordings in either DivX or H.264 (MPEG-4) format.
The Theater 650 promises a newly developed 3D comb filter algorithm and noise reduction for the best possible image quality. In addition, the new card is compatible with virtually all commonly used digital (SD) broadcasting standards: ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee), a standard in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and South Korea, and DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial , digital terrestrial broadcasting) for Europeans. The Theater 650 Pro works seamlessly with the following multimedia applications: SnapStream \ 's Beyond TV, Media Center (PC), Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition, and Microsoft Windows Vista early next year.
The tuner allows you to receive 125 channels at a time and has hardware MPEG-2 acceleration to take the resource requirement of performing PVR functions off the shoulder of your favorite processor. We’ve already outlined a plethora of features that a newcomer can use to get attention thanks to their high degree of integration, but it’s not too early to list the capabilities. The Theater 650 Pro has a 12-bit video decoder, also supports digital broadcast reception (see above), supports a wide range of audio standards, recognizes 3: 2 pull-down, is equipped with motion compensation noise reduction, and can even function as an FM tuner. It is promised that in addition to the PCI version, a PCIe (1 ×) version will also be released.
The Theater 650 Pro chipset is expected to be available for the first time in the first half of the summer on the product range of ASUSTek Computer Inc., Micro-Star International Co., Sapphire Technology Limited, Tul Corporation (a brand of PowerColor) and VisionTek Products. We do not have information about the exact price yet.
