Integrating the All-in-Wonder® Radeon™ 8500DV into Your Home Theater

Audio: Stereo versus Dolby® Digital ATI's preceding flagship product, the All-in-Wonder® Radeon™, marked the first instance of Dolby Digital pass-through on a graphics board, virtually eliminating the need for a dedicated MPEG decoder card by sending the encoded 5.1-channel stream directly to an external decoder. In similar form, the All-in-Wonder® Radeon™ 8500DV has the same pass-through capability, providing easy access to surround sound while watching DVD movies. If you haven't yet made the leap to a surround sound setup, the same breakout box that supplies video output can be used to deliver an encoded Dolby® Pro Logic signal to your home audio receiver through the analog audio output. If your amplifier doesn't feature support for either Dolby Digital or the analog Dolby Pro Logic standard, a stereo signal is sent through the analog RCA connectors for left and right channel separation. While it won't provide the same enveloping movie experience as Dolby Digital or Dolby Pro Logic, a stereo connection is still a great way to turn the PC into a veritable jukebox during parties and special events. DVD: Renowned Quality Revisited ATI's video quality has served as the industry benchmark for years. Performance features like motion compensation and inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT) reduce the host processor load, freeing valuable system resources for multitasking. Several other hardware additions ensure the quality of the video output is optimal. For instance, subpicture decoding blends subtitles and menu options to give the appearance of naturally highlighted graphics. Four-tap filtered up and downscaling allows you to resize the video viewing area without suffering performance or quality degradation. Temporal filtering smoothes the frames displayed between your display device's refresh rate (usually greater than 70Hz) and the video signal's native decoding rate of 59.94Hz to avoid repeated or dropped frames. Scrolling stock tickers, movie credits, and panning video best demonstrate the advantage of temporal filtering, as "motion judder" is effectively removed. Finally, enhanced adaptive de-interlacing utilizes a unique algorithm that searches for motion on a per-pixel basis and applies either bob or weave de-interlacing to eliminate the blurring and feathering artifacts encountered with competitive solutions. ATI's DVD player completes the package by bringing all of the hardware features into fruition. An easy-to-navigate user interface provides you with options to modify the aspect ratio of a DVD video, change the audio output, manipulate the video overlay and change power management settings.