ATI Theater 550 Pro card

[hrlslcbr]

I guess its not worth it to upgrade from the leadtek wintv Expert

If you don't need or want a card with hardware MPEG-2 encoder and a remote control (and a crappy program bundled with it ), I guess it's not worth it.

[e.lectronick]

I'm a little confused, over at Hexus.net, there's a guy from ATI Marketing Division, who says this about capturing to AVI:

"The question related to Theatre 550 Pro (T550P) and AVI

T550P was designed with MCE firmly in mind

As such its native format is MPEG and not AVI

Does this mean that you can't capture AVI ?

No... you can always record to any of the compatible formats available - according to the recording software and codecs being used - but you will need a good CPU to handle simultaneous MPEG-2 decoding and AVI encoding at the same time

This is where ATI's advanced filtering programs come to the fore

Thanks to these filters, the captured images are cleaner than before

Artefacts are the enemy of smooth encoding/decoding because they are random and all of them get captured

Our advanced filters (combs etc) mean a cleaner source - so the captured result is not only higher quality than before - but it is also a smaller file

It is harder to say if the AVI quality will always be higher quality than with previous generation chips because the variety of potential subformats involved means that a generic answer is harder to tie down (anything from older AVI with Intel codec to newer DivX codecs based on MPEG-4)

T550P can produce amazing results - but those could be undermind by a less than ideal combination of software/formats (remember we are only talking about AVI !)

Could AVI actually be better on Theatre 550 Pro ?...

...when using a powerful CPU on an optimal PC with great choice of codecs - then the (qualified) answer is 'yes'"


What's he talking about? Does the card have to first compress to MPEG2 then decompress back to .avi?

I asked him to clarify, and he simply reiterated that the 550 Pro is native to MPEG2 and not AVI. Which was kind of unhelpful in clarifying things.

This just doesn't make any sense to me. if you want to capture uncompressed .avi, you *CANT* capture to a lossy codec like MPEG2 and expect to have the quality back when decompressing to .avi again. What am I missing, here?

-Erik.