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 ?