ATI TV Wonder 650

ATI's TV Wonder 650 is an HDTV tuner on a PCI card that comes with HD PVR software and support for formats including DivX, H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and WMV 9.

ATI says that the TV Wonder 650 produces 'outstanding picture quality' thanks to its Theater 650 chip which has the same kind of motion-adaptive 3D comb filter and noise reduction you get in HDTVs. The tuner can connect to up to 125 off-air channels and encodes to MPEG-2 in hardware so that the recorded footage can be easily transferred to DVD.

The TV Wonder 650 also has an FM radio tuner, the ability to receive and record analogue TV, and can capture video from VCRs and camcorders.

The PVR software, Catalyst Media Center has a new interface and all the features you would expect from a PVR ie play, pause, record, stop and rewind live TV. A feature called MulTView, which needs two ATI TV tuner cards, allows you to record and watch two TV shows at the same time or watch one show picture-in-picture while recording another. The ThruView features allows you to watch TV on a translucent video window over other desktop applications.

"More consumers are embracing the media PC evolution than ever before. With today's announcement, these enthusiasts can enjoy new entertainment value featuring ATI's high quality TV-on-the-PC PVR solutions," said Paul Lypaczewski, Senior Vice President Marketing and General Manager, Desktop, ATI Technologies Inc. "The Media PC is now a standard fixture in home theaters; extending the entertainment experience with truly innovative features. For example, with TV Wonder 650, we're taking ATI's cutting-edge HDTV technology, that powers popular HDTVs, to transform the PC into amazing entertainment consumer appliances."

The ATI TV Wonder 650 is available now in North America for US$129 and later in the year in Europe.