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


The convergence of PC and home theater technologies has been a work in progress - a work few companies have dared to endeavor. It is difficult enough to engineer products that perform competitively over a wide range of operating systems without having to meld high quality video acceleration and audio output. Nevertheless, ATI Technologies has continually mated their most powerful 3D processors with ever-advancing video, audio, and connectivity features to form the All-in-Wonder® product family. The newest addition, dubbed the All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV, takes the computing experience to a whole new level of interactivity.

For this, the first in a series of articles dedicated to maximizing productivity (and enjoyment), we will focus on using the All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV as a bridge between your personal computer and the world of big-screen movies, blaring audio and television.


Video: Several options and more to come
The first step in incorporating your PC into a home theater setup is sending a video output to your television. The All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV comes equipped with a breakout box offering both composite (RCA) and S-Video outputs. Additionally, a DVI-I to component (YPrPb) connector will soon be available for use with televisions supporting the component interface. Compared to composite (a one-channel signal carrying chrominance, luminance, picture, and synchronization information) and S-Video (splits chrominance and luminance information into separate signals), the component connector divides the signal into red, green, and blue channels for the highest-quality video. Additionally, YPrPb support is provided for a non-interlaced display on a big-screen television.

Once you have chosen the best connection available for your television (component, S-Video, or composite, in descending order), you can then adjust the quality of the video output through the Displays property page. Brightness, contrast, saturation, hue and gamma slider controls are all available during video playback, allowing you to interactively fine-tune the picture quality without having to guess and check. Moreover, once adjustments have been made to the overlay, they can be individually reset back to their default values, making it easy to switch between two output devices for watching movies. Since adjustments often differ between televisions and monitor displays, individual size/position controls are available for each device, and are accessible though the Displays property page.

Adding further to the flexibility of the All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV is a configurable display setting that allows you to set either a television or VGA monitor as the primary output. Changing the television to the primary display (in the advanced Display property box) and enabling the expanded desktop (under Settings, in the Display Properties) allows you to watch TV, view a DVD or watch a video file on the television while browsing the Internet or using a word processor on the VGA monitor. If you'd prefer big-screen gaming, the monitor display can be cloned on the television, allowing you enjoy the benefits of a large viewing area and surround sound audio system without having the hassle of re-wiring 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.

Television: Can We See That Again?
One of the most compelling features of the All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV is the stereo TV tuner, which features TV-on-Demand.

Like other Personal Video Recorders, the All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV can pause television, enabling instant replays of spectacular sports plays while transparently recoding the live video feed. However, rather than pay a monthly subscription service, the recording capability of the All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV is limited only by the hard disk space you allocate for stored video. When the desktop needs to be the center of attention, the television window can be made translucent. This feature, which ATI is debuting with the All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV, eliminates the need to move the TV window around. Instead, the translucent window can be clicked through, allowing you to monitor the television while working on the desktop.

Remote: Bringing It All Together
Until now, the biggest inconvenience associated with linking a PC and home entertainment system has been the need for computer access to flip between play lists, manipulate DVD software or change game settings. With the All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV, these processes have been simplified with a radio frequency remote control that does not require line-of-sight for proper operation. All of the functions of a conventional DVD/TV/VCR remote are accounted for, in addition to an easily accessible mouse.

A Gift-Wrapped Package
The All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV is a versatile product in the traditional computing environment. However, linked to a home theater system, the card shines further through big-screen gaming, pervasive cinematic experiences, and audio fit for the discerning multimedia enthusiast. With the ability to perform the duties of a TV tuner, Personal Video Recorder, CD player, Digital Video editor and gaming console, value and space savings become two integral qualities of the All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV in a home theater environment.

These features and many more all result in making All-in-Wonder® Radeon 8500DV an essential part to build a really powerful home theater.