Black Box: ATI All-in-Wonder Pro AGP Video Card

by Larry Lemm
Summer/Fall 1999

One way to get more out of your television is to marry it to your computer. For the stalwart souls who don't mind installing boards into their computers, any card that can deliver the computer's visual output to a TV set would be the key to this marriage. The ATI All-in-Wonder is more than a plain vanilla video card, however, and the 8MB AGP All-in-Wonder Pro is top notch. The card is a 2D S-VGA video card with some 3D capability (with ATI's Rage Pro Chipset for you gamers) that includes an NTSC encoder for display on a TV. Beyond this, it adds some TV and VCR-type components to the computer in which it lives: a TV tuner, closed-caption display and search, programmable recording of shows and the software to run everything. If you're building your own PC/TV, consider installing this card for a good start.

It's a VGA Card

The All-in-Wonder Pro is an excellent 2D VGA card. With 8MBs of RAM, it has the power to display graphics at 1600x1200 pixels with an impressive 85Hz refresh rate. The drivers for the All-in-Wonder Pro also include some interesting features, such as color correction and the ability to adjust the display's position on the screen.

It's a Tuner Card

The All-in-Wonder Pro also includes a TV tuner that is highly functional. Not only does the included software auto-tune available channels, but its ability to search for programs by words in their closed captioning, display and record closed caption text is a useful feature as well.

It's also a Digital VCR

The All-in-Wonder Pro also has video capture capability. One use of this feature is digitally recording TV shows to the hard drive for future playback. You can also program the card to record a certain program at a certain time. The card captures at a resolution of 320X480 and is incapable of full 60-field-per-second capture. Even installed in a system with an A/V-optimized SCSI hard drive, this would not deliver full-screen, full-motion video. It would be fine, however, for watching somewhat jerky video in a window, or somewhat jerky highly pixelated full-screen video. One drawback of the card is that it uses Microsoft's .AVI format for capture, which limits the captured video file size to 2.1GB. At the card's best resolution, this may not be enough room for a given hour-long TV show.
All in all, the All-in-Wonder Pro provides an important link for delivering PC functionality to the TV set.

All-in-Wonder Pro Video Graphics Adapter/TV-tuner/Video Capture Card (AGP Version)
ATI Technologies
(905) 882-2600
www.atitech.com
$170
Minimum System Requirements: Windows 95/98, Sound Card, CD-ROM, AGP Slot
Recommended System: Pentium II