ATI Rage Theater

I'm curious about the purpose of this chip. A friend just bought a new X800XL that comes with an ATI Rage Theater chip on the back. I'm not exactly sure what this is for. I know it's for VIVO, but how exactly might one put it to use ? My understanding is, you plug the video out from a TV, VCR or video camera into the back of the video card and you'd have the ability to record video directly to hard disk. is this correct ?

but again, taking the example of the video camera, one could connect the video cam to the PC directly via IEEE1394 (firewire) and achieve the same objective. so how exactly would this differ from using the VIVO capability of the board ? plus another thing mentioned on the rage theater specs on the ati site is digital audio - how does the rage theater, which is basically for VIVO capabilities, manage to do digital audio ?

Theatre chip is for All In Wonder cards (and tv cards) and is used to run TV on computer plus with the MMC programs can take vid in/out from external sources and record to hard drive from either tv or external inputs.
Not sure if it`s used on normal vivo cards.
If card has a tuner module on the front it`s an AIW.

vivo allows you to attach analogue video cameras to your pc.

as well as vcrs etc

the ATI Rage Theater chip doesnt give you tv. It doesnt include a tv tuner

but can't u already do that via firewire ? i.e. get input from vid cam into your PC ? :confused: i say this because I have done it myself. doesn't that make the rage theater (w/o tv tuner) obsolete ?

Not at all. ATI's Theater chips are AV processors so they can compress, cleanup and otherwise manipulate the video before writing to disk (they have MPEG-2 output engines) and they also have hardware AV sync ability (among other things) that allow them to process audio along with the video to make sure both are in frame sync with each other.

Firewire is for capturing raw AV only, you still have to process that AV somehow to make it watchable, which is what the Theater can do for you.

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Originally Posted by johndoe

but can't u already do that via firewire ? i.e. get input from vid cam into your PC ? :confused: i say this because I have done it myself. doesn't that make the rage theater (w/o tv tuner) obsolete ?

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analogue video cameras dont have firewire do they?

so do they in any way help with the process of encoding / decoding ? any speed improvements ?