ATI Adds TV Recording App to Combo Cards

TV-in TV-out. While many of us scratched our heads and wondered why anyone would want to watch TV on their computers when TV capabilities emerged on graphics cards, we're now seeing folks leaning toward using great big hard drives to record video. It's all starting to fit together, and when you can record, play, and burn TV programs and movies to disk at a reasonable price (as well as pipe them over to your gigantic DTV via your home LAN), we'll have to wait and see how many VCRs we see sitting on the sidewalk with "Free" signs. So far, however, the individual technologies have not been pulled together in a manner that's easy to implement, but every little bit helps. Moving toward some semblance of further TV/PC convergence, CyberLink has announced that its PowerVCR II software will now be bundled with ATI's All-In-Wonder Radeon and ATI TV-Wonder combo through ASK Corp. As a result of this agreement, CyberLink and ASK are bringing features like Sony's iEPG web-based Electronic Programming Guide, Time-Shifting Playback and an MPEG-2 software encoder to ATI Combo Cards available in Japan (remember that all of these news stories are translated ). PowerVCR II is designed to perform real-time MPEG-1 and 2 video recording directly from any video source (such as TV tuners, VCRs, DV camcorders, camcorders, and PC cameras) through video capture devices. It records 320x240 resolution video in real-time on a Pentium II 450, and 720x480 resolution on a Pentium III 650, and encodes multiplexed video/audio files complemented by the MPEG-1 and 2 video transcoding functions, video cut and merge, time shifting and pre-schedule recording features. Embedded within PowerVCR II is an application that provides real time services and allows access to Internet resources for creating and publishing video.