TV Junkie Alert

For information junkies, the ability to surf TV channels while working at a PC can be invaluable. While you won't see TV tuners as a regular system component any time soon, you can buy expansion cards that provide this capability. One that we tested and liked is ATI Technologies' ATI-TV , which we tried in conjunction with ATI's 3D Xpression graphics card.

ATI-TV is an ISA-bus card that connects by ribbon cable to a proprietary connector found on Video Xpression and 3D Xpression graphics cards. The card holds a TV tuner (it's well shielded), a video decoder chip, and a teletext decoder chip. The ATI-TV card has external CATV, composite video, and S-Video inputs. ATI provid es Video Player software on a CD-ROM. This capable program supplies a varied suite of functions and appears on- screen as a window that you can fully maximize.

With the card and its software, you can zoom in on video and capture images or movie clips to disk. The card can display closed captioning (NTSC), but it can also store the text, so you can scroll through it later. Also, it can read the captions in the background and pop up the TV image when a caption includes keywords you've specified. The ATI-TV can scan through all available channels and display thumbnails of each program in an array of windows; you click on one to watch in full-screen mode.

You can use the card's video capture feature to grab still or moving images from VCRs, camcorders, and laser discs for multimedia presentations. Your system won't take a performance hit when displaying TV programs because frame rate viewing is achieved with no CPU loading. However, the streaming video capture frame rate will depend on CPU speed, availability of system memory, and hard disk performance.

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Product Information

ATI-TV.......................$129 

ATI Technologies
Thornhill, Ontario, Canada  
Phone:    (905) 882-2600 
Internet: 
http://www.atitech.ca
 
Circle 1099 on Inquiry Card.

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ATI-TV

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