Any cards that can do both NTSC and Pal???

[Mr.Roboto]

I was considering buying a All-In-Wonder Card but then realized that I may be going to Japan for a year or 2. I want something that I can use in both countries since I am building a small form factor PC that can be retired to a DVD/VCD/Div-x player and net browser for my living room.

Do any cards allow you to encode/decode with both NTSC and PAL signals? Otherwise it looks like I shall be going for 2 separate cards. (ie. 1 Radeon 9000 + separate capture card for each area....) Too bad since I only get 1 PCI slot and 1 AGP slot and the USB capture cards are way too low for image quality.

Let me know if anyone has any suggestions. Thx.

[hwoodwar]

I don't know wether or not this applies to the entire All-In-Wonder line, but I have a ATI AIW Radeon 7500 and it does both PAL and NTSC on top of that, in the cable standard for the MMC Japan is listed.

[Mr.Roboto]

Thanks... Was considering buying that card myself. Do you think the performance jump to an 8500 AIW is worth the extra money?

[Mr.Roboto]

Off ATI Site for the AIW:

TV-tuner requirements
TV signal from amplified antenna or cable. Versions available for:
NTSC (North America, Japan, and Latin America*)
PAL B/G/D/K/I and Secam L/D/K (Europe and International PAL/Secam countries)
Features vary from country to country and depending on the television standard. *Note that Latin American countries using the PAL M and PAL N standards including Argentina and Brazil are supported by the NTSC version.

It sounds like the NTSC ver will not work in Japan if I am interpreting the above correctly.

[Gazorgan]

Japan isn't PAL, it's NTSC-Somehting. The card will work.

[hwoodwar]

Mr Roboto:

I suspect the 8500 AIW is worth the difference (now), but I am not really qualified to answer that intelligently.

Let me explain further:

When I was buying my AIW (about 9 months ago) there was over $100 price difference between the two cards, and the main difference I saw in the specifications was a different onboard tuner module. So, I got the AIW Radeon 7500. I don't really remember what the performance difference was.

Now, I see at Newegg a $52 difference between the Retail AIW Radeon 7500 and the Retail AIW Radeon 8500DV, or a $43 difference between the OEM versions. With that "minimal" price difference I would get the 8500 if I was buying today.

Note: If you consider an OEM version, be sure to check wether or not it comes with the digital-to-analog monitor adapter, as the retail version does come with it, but when I was buying mine about nine months ago the OEMs did not. That is why I decided to go with the retail version as at that time the adapters cost around $30.

I'm sure someone else can explain the performance difference and wether or not it seems better to go with the 8500 based on the performance difference.

[Mr.Roboto]

Just verified that. It looks like Japan is NTSC. I was initially looking at Australia which is PAL and I may also be working there so the issue is still valid. If anyone knows about whither or not you can use an AIW with both NTSC and PAL for the TV-Tuner section, please let me know. Thanks in advance.

[dun4cheap]

The 8500 has a digital tuner compared to the philips analog. Here is the catch, on paper the digital tuner was suppose to out perform the analog tuner. It did not quite work out once in use. ATI has since gone back to the Analog Philips tuner which is on the 7500 and 9700 AIW. The only true gain from the 7500-8500 is GPU. If you look closely at the 7500AIW clock speeds they are pretty high. I personally have the 7500 at it works great. If their is a difficult choice it should be between the 7500 or 9700 which will have hardware decoding and encoding built in which has not been seen before... This should really help when doing vcd, svcd and DVD... Can't wait to see it in action.

[Mr.Roboto]

So the 7500 performs better tv-tuner wise? I would have thought that a digital tuner would allow for eaier hacks to things such as macrovision etc.. (And the possibility of switching drivers so that PAL could be decoded... but perhaps I don't know what I am talking about). The last reply suggests that the AIW 8500 is not neccessarily a better performer as far as tv goes but probably better for gaming. There 's no way I'll be shelling out the money for a 9700 AIW so perhaps the 7500 is the easiest way to go for now. I've seen lots of Macrovision work-arounds for this card but none that specifically mention the 8500. I guess that is due to the digital tv-tuner section that was added for the 8500?

Still trying to find out if an AIW that is designated as NTSC will work in a PAL region (ie decode PAL signals for viewing...) Thanks for the suggestions and info so far everyone...

[dun4cheap]

My brothers wife is from Chev Republic. She had brought videos back that were in pal. We connected her pal VCR to my ATI TV PC Wonder card and select pal. It worked fine. The AIW card now has the same option and I would think it would work also but I have not tried that. I do know like the powercolor 7000 cards you could choose between ntsc and pal out from the TV out. The bad thing with that is by default they are set to PAL....

[alaindelon]

Mr.Roboto,you were on the right track when visiting the ATI website.The TUNER part has different frequencies for different countries(different spectrums of the broadcastbands are used depending on national issues like military use and so on).There are television sets with multituners built in but as far as i know,NO such tuner is available on any capture card.The VIDEO portion however should handle both PAL & NTSC fine.