ATI has now announced a successor to the very popular ATI Theater 550 Pro MPEG2 chip, which has been used frequenctly with TV-tuners. The new chip can handle both analog and digital TV signals, which the previous could not, which is of course a big plus. Theater 650 Pro supports both the American ATSC format and the European DVB-T format. Theather 650 Pro use several technologies to optimize the image quality with the received video signals, among others a motion sensitive 3D comb filter and noise reduction technologies. The circuit which will be adapted by several manufacturers of external TV-tuners will like the predecessor support Windows Media Center but also ATI’s own Catalyst Media Center software.
The first products based on ATI’s nya Theater 650 Pro circuits are expected to appear at the start of the summer from manufacturers such as ASUS, MSI, Sapphire and more.
“With a 125-channel TV tuner, Theater 650 Pro features hardware MPEG2 encoding to offload intensive PVR functions from the main computer processor to deliver extremely competitive performance. As a highly integrated chip, Theater 650 Pro includes a 12-bit worldwide video decoder, digital TV support, worldwide audio decoder, MPEG encoder, 3:2 pull-down, motion compensated noise reduction, edge enhancement, FM radio reception, hardware DRM engine, PCI/PCI-Express 1X bridge, and much more.”
