Video Card: ATI All In Wonder RADEON 9800 Pro Revi :: The Wonder Stuff

DVD Playback

The first ATI card to have hardware DVD playback with motion compensation was the ATI Rage card first introduced in 1995. Subsequent ATI cards have included features such as iDCT (inverse Discrete Cosine Transform) and other features designed to enhance the PC DVD playback experience. Today's AIW RADEON 9800 Pro card is a fully featured hardware DVD players in it's own right.

With MMC 8.5, ATI has kept the same basic interface as previous version MMC 8.2 of their multimedia center for the DVD playback. The controls for the DVD player are pretty self explanatory. You can choose from the following options on the DVD playback: play , pause, stop, fast forward (1x-8x speed), fast rewind, next chapter, previous chapter, angle, mute, close caption, jump to, restart program, unzoom, parental control, A/B repeat, still capture and eject.

DVD playback on a 9800 Pro on a the 2.8 GHz P4 system with 512MB is great. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets played without pause and had played smoothly while using ATI's DVD player. All chapters were accessible from the menu, making for easy navigation from one click of the remote control or of the mouse.

The Matrix was a hit movie when released in 1999. It's recent sequel, Matrix Reloaded has done well over $275 million in box office receipts so far, far outstripping the original. For an R-rated movie, Matrix Reloaded is the number one grossing movie of all time. The Matrix on DVD is a double layered DVD. This can and does cause a pause in the middle of the movie when the movie switches to the second layer. Otherwise the movie played flawlessly on the AIW 9800 Pro and the ATI DVD Player.

The Lord Of The Rings was released last year starring Elijah Wood, Christopher Lee, Sir Ian McKellan and others in a adaptation of J.R.R Tolkien's Middle-Earth epic fantasy. Both DVDs of the standard 2 disc set played without issue throughout the movie. The third installment of this 3 part trilogy should be released at the end of the year and I can't wait!

TV Tuner

ATI's AIW 9800 Pro is ATI's top of the line "do everything" All In Wonder card today. This card combines ATI's fastest video card available, the RADEON 9800 Pro with the TV functions of the TV Wonder and more. With MMC 8.5, the interface has changed a little bit. The AIW 9800 Pro is every bit as fast as the 9800 Pro non-AIW. Several times

TV

So let's take a look at ATI's TV Player that's bundled with the AIW 9800 Pro. ATI used the Theater 200 chip in the packaging, their follow-on chip to the Rage Theater chip that they used in every video card since the Rage series. The chip features a analog cable-ready 125 channel TV Tuner with the ability to take input from both a amplified antenna and cable TV. Unfortunately, I don't have cable or dish TV here at home, so a amplified TV antenna will have to do. Add to that the fact that my residence is under a airway that is frequented by airplanes passing overhead, and my TV reception isn't going to be very good in the best case scenario.

Setup of the TV Player on the AIW 9800 is easy and straightforward. Once the drivers are installed, you simply double click the TV button on the MMC taskbar. At this point Windows XP will detect the WDM (Windows Display Manager) and the TV tuner. If the TV tuner isn't present, or if there's a problem with WDM, a message "Unable to start TV" will appear. If all is well, the TV Initialization Wizard will pop up.

The Initialization Wizard is a step by step installation program for ATI's TV Player. The first step is clicking the type of TV source you have, Antenna or Cable. Antenna of course refers to an amplified TV antenna, Cable is for Cable TV. In this instance, the TV Player detected channels 2,4 ,5 ,7,9,11,13, 18,22, 28, 30,34,40, 46, 52,56, 58. These are the channels available to my area with regular TV. The next step is setting a password for those that are parents and want to control what children watch. Audio connection check is the next step, which double checks that you've attached the audio cable (without the cables being in the right jacks, there will be no audio, make sure you use the Quick Setup Guide and manual included to set this up). The next step is the sound initialization wizard. From here you can check to make sure that you have audio.

The Personal Video Recorder of the AIW 9800 Pro has many various settings which perform a TiVO like function for the PC. Many of the more interesting features of the Personal Video Recorder are available to the AIW 9800 Pro. Of course this feature is also available on other All In Wonder cards, but it's an excellent feature nonetheless.

MPEG-1 is the lowest quality setting for the PVR. It records TV playback at a resolution of 352x240 and is recorded in MPEG-1 format. Recording a 30 minute TV show takes up about 300MB of hard drive space. With 44 KHz Audio, the capture rate is about 1.13 Megabits/second or about 67.8 Megabits a minute. This gives a theoretical of about 508 MB/hour record space on a hard drive, or about 200 hours on a 120 GB hard drive. In practice, about 1.2 GB is required for a 2 hour TV move (I recorded 1 hour in Video CD format the space required was around 608MB). When recording a 1 hour test at this setting.

ATI's VCR is the second lowest quality setting for the VCR. This setting records TV playback at a resolution of 320x480 NTSC (U.S. TV) and is recorded in VCR format. Using the VCR setting gives a capture rate of about 2 Megabits/second or around 900 MB a hour or around 120 hours on a 120GB HDD (not exactly, because of the space required for other programs on the hard drive and because of the file system used by Windows. In practice, about 2GB is required for a 2 hour movie at this setting.

The Good setting is the third setting for ATI's PVR. This setting records shows in the ATI VCR format but at a resolution of 720x480 instead of the 320x480 of the previous setting. The capture rate of this setting is around 6 Megabits per second. In theory, this setting takes up around 2.7 GB/hour of hard drive space. In practice, this setting uses 2.9-3.0 GB/hour.

The DVD setting is the "Best Quality" setting for the AIW 9800 Pro's TV recording. This records in MPEG-2 format at a resolution of 720x480 NTSC. Audio is recorded at 48.10 KHz 16-bit. The capture rate at this setting is 8 megabits/second or around 3.6 GB/hour of recording time. In practice, nearly 4 GB of hard disk space is taken for every hour of recording at this setting.

The video picture on the AIW 9800 Pro is exactly the same as that on the AIW 9700 Pro. As the TV Tuner is identical and the Theater 200 chip is the same, there shouldn't be any difference going from the AIW 9700 Pro's TV Tuner and the AIW 9800 Pro's TV tuner. The image quality, is in fact a little better than the included screenshots.

mulTView is ATI's proprietary picture in a picture (PIP) capability. Introduced with the AIW 9700 Pro late last year, this feature is extremely useful. For purposes of this review, I installed a TV Wonder VE after the installation of the AIW 9800 Pro. The TV tuner was correctly identified by MMC 8.5. Starting TV at this point brought up the initialization wizard. Once I checked "Enable mulTView" I was good to go. The position of the window for PIP is configurable. You can position it where you like on the corners.

Unfortunately, I only have a 19" monitor. Picture In Picture worked with the AIW 9800 and TV Wonder, but to be honest, it's a feature designed more for bigger TVs. You can also display two separate TV channels in mulTView. Instead of picture in a picture you can switch between two television programs by a click of the button. You can also record one show while watching another with mulTView.

EAZYLOOK

Remote Wonder Tabs

All of ATI's AIW products come with a wireless RF remote control to control the Multimedia Center and it's various features. You can also purchase a Remote Wonder separately for $49.95 off ATI's website. It's a great companion piece of hardware to any ATI card available. If you use your PC to play DVDs, or other applications, this remote is easy to use and of high quality. So why a wireless RF remote? There are two basic types of remote controls. Radio Frequency remotes use radio waves to control the multimedia center. The nice thing about RF remotes is that you can use them in between rooms and out of line of sight of the USB receiver. This type of remote is what ATI uses here. The other type of remote is IR or infrared. The IR remote must have a LOS to the receiver, or else there will be no control of the programs.

Installation of ATI's remote is very simple and easy. Simply plug the USB receiver into a free USB port, plug the 4 AA batteries into the remote control, and press a button. If Remote Wonder 1.5 is installed a pretty screen will popup and installation features will popup.

ATI's remote control has the following buttons: Power, A/B/C/D/E/F buttons, Web browser, Library, DVD, TV, right/left mouse buttons, D-pad, channel up/down, volume +/-, mute, a 10 number pad, stereo ,fast forward, fast rewind, play, pause, stop and record buttons. All of these are self explanatory except for the A/B/C/D/E/F buttons. These are pretty self-explanatory except for the A-F buttons. Those are programmable buttons that you can set to use different functions. The functions available are: presses a shortcut key, Displays or hides the Start menu, shuts down Windows, starts CD Audio, starts Video CD, starts File Player, starts a Windows program. To set the functions, simply bring up the Remote Wonder setup screen and assign a key to the function you want.

EAZYLOOK is ATI's new graphical user interface that works with Multimedia Center to make easy changes to the settings, start TV in fullscreen, change the tint, brightness, and color displays. To enable EAZY LOOK, simply hit the setup key and a menu will pop up. If a remote control is not installed, EAZY LOOK will be disabled and give a note saying install Remote Wonder 1.5 software.

If Remote Wonder 1.5 is installed and the remote is as well, a series of checkboxes will pop up. The first sets of items are: To enable EAZYLOOK 1. Press any button on the remote 2. Press the full screen button on the remote 3. Select the full screen mode at the desktop. To disable EAZYLOOK 1. Press the ESC key on the keyboard 2. Press any key on the keyboard. Options 1. Always enable EAZYLOOK 2. Display Permanent Indicators 3. Disable visual effects.