Theater 650 Pro Discussion

[BFever]

MMike,

Will we see an AIW card with this new 650 tuner installed? ATI milked the non-550 tuner forever.

Bfever

ps. I know you can't comment about future products, but you can tell us if the old tuner will be ditched.

[jonaslasky]

Right then,….

I think what people want to know is if the T650P has the same affliction(s) wherein raising the volume above 150 in the Registry or via Graphedit results in no appreciable improvement.

This is easy to test and as such the answer should be equally easy to obtain provided one has access to said hardware.

Here’s an idea, how about ATI providing some test Theater 650 Pro cards to a few Hexus.net forum members and previous owners of Theater 550 Pro cards!?!

Yeah.... that's the ticket! Ship me that evaluation T 650 based board ASAP. At least we would do real tests on it. I still want to talk to the guy at ATI who decided to make PowerCinema the DVR application of choice. What the hell was he smoking? At least this time around ATI is talking to Snapstream.

But seriously... I think the five of us who "keep complaining about the same crap" should get free T 650 boards. I would gladly give my T 550 board to one of the five who keep complaining about us complaining. So how about it Mike? I think ATI can spare five boards.

I think Mike is saying that the volume is slightly louder than the T 550 but not quite there.

Jonas

[Multimedia Mike]

Hi,
Just some quick answers to various questions/comments:
- no, none of you are getting samples of Theater 650 Pro... good try though
- I'm not sure when CMC will be available, but it will be shipping with Theater 650 Pro products
- I'm not exactly sure of all the ways CMC will be distributed, but I'm pretty sure it won't be free to download
- regarding the volume issue, I don't have a retail board to test with, but like I said the issue is improved and I could definitely hear a difference between say 150 and 250 (while on a Theater 550 Pro it's basically the same), but I not setting anyone's expectations because it's still not "really" loud, but I honestly think it's acceptable and I personally wouldn't have any issues using it
- regarding temperature, I haven't done or seen any official measurements, but I wouldn't expect it to be any cooler than the Theater 550 Pro

[hrlslcbr]

- no, none of you are getting samples of Theater 650 Pro... good try though

[Multimedia Mike]

Hi,
Just a couple of updates about your Theater 650 Pro inquiries:
-Regarding video conversion, it is done using the same technology as the Avivo Video Converter, which can be used from CMC. So currently it's purely software, but it's actually really fast and a lot faster then some of the other things I've compared it to.

-Regarding VBR, I've done some testing myself with a Theater 650 Pro card using CMC and I got some nice results. I recorded some sports news so there were some talking scenes and some fast paced scenes and here is how the recordings looked:
All of these recordings were in MPEG-2 DVD format:
Base: 2M, Peak: 5M, I got rates between 0.42 and 4.70
Base: 5M, Peak: 9M, I got rates between 1.83 and 8.88

So that looks all fine to me.

[spacded]

does this card have Svideo and or scart input connectivity?

[SHSPVR]

but it's actually really fast and a lot faster then some of the other things I've compared it to

Sure it is in tell you try on try it on end box like under 2Hz
To bad it not hardware trasoncoder that would have been really nice

[Octavean]

- no, none of you are getting samples of Theater 650 Pro... good try though

Honestly, can you blame me for trying?

Anyway,..

The Theater 650 Pro has support for (in North America) NTSC and ATSC (no QAM 64/256 support,....too bad). So the T650P has both quasi T550P analog and HDTV Wonder OTA functionality.

However, can both SDTV and HDTV functionality of the T650P be used simultaneously in applications like MCE 2K5 and the newly released Windows Vista Beta 2 (unlike the HDTV Wonder)???

[Multimedia Mike]

Hi,
Some more quick responses:
- Theater 650 Pro cards will have S-video and Composite video inputs
- you can receive both NTSC and ATSC, but there's still only one encoder so you can't watch one, while recording another using only one Theater 650 Pro

[hrlslcbr]

Hi,
Some more quick responses:
- Theater 650 Pro cards will have S-video and Composite video inputs
- you can receive both NTSC and ATSC, but there's still only one encoder so you can't watch one, while recording another using only one Theater 650 Pro

No component inputs?
But can you capture with both if one is encoding to MPEG-2 and the other just to uncompressed avi?

[SHSPVR]

hrlslcbr I don't think it has build in Tee Splitter and your not going to be able to do uncompressed avi at the same.

[Sunfox]

Hmm, I hope we're going to see a "TV Wonder Extreme" or some such beast.

[Lajoie]

-Regarding video conversion, it is done using the same technology as the Avivo Video Converter, which can be used from CMC. So currently it's purely software, but it's actually really fast and a lot faster then some of the other things I've compared it to.

AVIVO Video converter was advertised saying that it use X1x00 cards (one of the main reason I upgraded from 8500LE to X1600) to improve performance of conversion, and now you are saying that it does use the video card at all to accelerate the conversion. What's the deal? Is ATI going to release a version which make use of the processing power of it videocard someday??

About 650 VS 550, would there be any reason to upgrade if we only use anolog feed, or is the 650 targeted at the digital feeds mainly?

[raindance]

Hi, I've got a question. Would the PAL card be able to record NTSC video via composite/s-video input? The 550pro wasn't able to do that if I'm not wrong. That was the one reason why I did not buy the 550pro.

[SHSPVR]

Lajoie do under stand the meaning hybrid in short it mean analogue + digital TV tuner chips some have FM all rolled in to one package, Here in US no manufacturer product analogue tuner or sale in 2007 in US they most switch to hybrid or all digital base tuner and 2 year later in 2009 all analogue broadcast get turn off.

ATTN: Mike
Is this a Hardware or Software feature enhancement in ref to Motion compensated noise reduction and Edge enhancement.

[Multimedia Mike]

Hi,
I just want to clarify one thing for everyone because there seems to be some confusion. If you have one Theater 650 Pro product, you can only watch/record one thing at a time, be it analog, digital, whatever.

Regarding the Avivo Video Converter, the reason it was made for X1k cards is that there is intent to make it hardware assisted in the future, but for now it's all software.

raindance, a Theater 650 Pro based card is either NTSC or PAL, it actually has different hardware one it, so you can't use one to receive signals from the other, no matter what type of input you use.

SHSPVR, all those features are hardware and are used no matter what app (CMC, MCE, etc.) you use.

Lajoie, the analog TV quality is improved in Theater 650 Pro over Theater 550 Pro, check out my first few posts on this tread for the details (including the link to the webpage for full feature listings).