ATI AIW -- Is it Worth it?

[Caveman]

All in Wonder? Sounds neat but what value is it? What could a person do with its capability that you can't do with a "standard" vid card?

 

[CQuinn]

It can be.

Older AIW cards were sometimes hard to set up, but once they were working they are very
nice as a one slot solution for a decent to fast graphics card with:

TV Tuner with cable, composite and S-video inputs (and firewire in one older version)

DVD decoder

A fair to decent software front end with some PVR features.

 

[ptw]

The All-In-Wonder is basically a video card with a TV-Tuner built-in. So you can use your computer to watch TV, or use it like you would a VCR--to record shows at different times/channels so that you can watch them later. The advantage of a computer is that it's easier to set-up more complex programming than on a VCR, plus you are only limited by harddrive space and not the 6-8 hour, low-quality limit of a video tape.

I can play DVD's on my computer's DVD player, but I use my AIW card to hook up a VCR so I can also watch my old VHS tapes. I also have used my AIW to capture video from some of my old tapes and convert them to MPEG and stick them on DVDs. I haven't used any of the video-out functions, which basically means you can hook up your PC to a TV.

 

[Caveman]

I suppose my primary use then would be to convert old media to DVD format... Which sounds useful...

 

[Sheriff]

Originally posted by: Caveman
I suppose my primary use then would be to convert old media to DVD format... Which sounds useful...

The newer AIW's is 20% Hardware assist in it's chipset for decoding while the rest is software and CPU. You will see a high CPU usage while doing that.