I've read like a dozen reviews on the card coz I want to get one, too. Yes, the Cyberlink Power Cinema(CPC) is something to laugh at. The card is compatible with Windows Media Center(WMC) OS, so if you have that OS then you have the best application for the hardware possible. Also an alternative, you can buy ATI's Multimedia Center(MMC) for $10 I believe. There's a bunch of others that are free and not so free; expensive and cheapo.
Let me discuss more about the card. Most of the reviews if not all mentioned that flipping between channels took roughly 2 seconds, which is rather slow. One reviewer surmised that it may be due to the tuner or CPC software. What's worse is that CPC won't allow you to explicitly tune in to a channel. You change channels linearly. So if you're on channel 1 and you want to go to channel 25, that would take you 50 seconds to accomplish.
Another reviewer mentioned that when using using the PVR feature of CPC, there's a slight delay between when the signal arrives to the hardware and what you actually see on screen. To illustrate, if you watch the same channel on a regular TV and your PC tuner what you see on your PC is a few seconds behind what is showing on TV. One gamer mentioned that when he plugged his Sony PS2 to the PC tuner there's a lag between his button mashing and what the characters are doing on screen. He recommended using an alternative application, DScaler and he got a realtime response although the visuals was not as good.
I surmise that this delay is due to the filtering the Theater 550 Pro chip employs. Since it needs to buffer several frames for analyzing there's inherently a delay from when a signal arrives and when it actually gets displayed on screen. If there's a way to enable/disable these features through software that would be great. I'm not too excited about the filters ATI used on the chip as it blurs or softens the final image slightly.
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