Hardware (cont’d)

MPEG-2 encoding

THEATER 550 PRO also features a built-in MPEG-2 encoder, making it the first ATI ASIC to support this feature. Both audio and video care compressed on THEATER 550 PRO, ensuring that CPU utilization rates aren’t as intensive for these tasks. Besides lower CPU utilization, another benefit of dedicated hardware encoding is fewer dropped frames. Finally, because dedicated hardware encoding frees up your CPU, you can perform other tasks while you’re encoding videos such as browsing the internet or reading email. And since audio and video encoding is handled on the same chip, audio and video remain in sync with each other.

Sometimes when encoding videos, frames get dropped in the recording (this happens most often when recording with very high quality settings). This occurs when the encoding device doesn’t have enough available memory to temporarily store video data. When this arises, the information is lost, resulting in the dropped frames you see in your recording.

16MB of memory on ATI card

To help ensure that frames aren’t dropped during the encoding process, THEATER 550 PRO cards are equipped with 16MB of memory. This allows THEATER 550 PRO to handle MPEG encoding at up to 15Mbps.

New silicon TV tuner

In previous ALL-IN-WONDER and TV WONDER cards, ATI has gone with a TV tuner from Philips to provide TV functionality. The Philips tuners were quite responsive changing channels quite rapidly, and didn’t generate a lot of heat, but the Philips tuner was massive, often taking up the bulk of space on the PCB.

In contrast, THEATER 550 PRO uses a silicon TV tuner from Microtune, the MT2050. The new tuner is tiny, and sits underneath a gold-plated casing on the TV WONDER ELITE and Sapphire THEATRIX at the very top of the board. The new tuner requires minimal external components, and contains fewer parts -- in turn allowing it to consumer less power and generate less heat. According to ATI, the MT2050 is able to generate a power saving of 11% over older tuners, while requiring 20% less surface area.

Gold-plated TV tuner

This space savings allows ATI and their board partners to use half height PCBs on their THEATER 550 PRO cards, making the cards ideal for cramped areas such as those found inside of a small form factor chassis from Shuttle or Biostar. In addition to TV tuning, the MT2050 also tunes FM radio signals, providing FM and TV tuning capabilities to THEATER 550 PRO cards.

In operation, we’ve found the new tuner delivers good visual quality, although its performance is definitely less than exhilarating. Changing channels with the new tuner takes more than two seconds to complete, making rapid channel changes in increments of 1 (say for instance, going from channel 40 to 50 one-by-one) a very tedious process. The Philips tuner ATI used previously was considerably faster.