Will Wait For Radeon HD

Posted by santosj on April 17, 2007

I’ve been debating for a few months now on which TV Tuner I should buy. My requirements are fairly high, so I’m having a difficult time finding one that isn’t terribly expensive. Well, I’m not worried about the price because I’ll most likely spend a large sum anyway, if it gives me what I need.

I’ve been looking at the early (rumor and speculation) details of the Radeon HD and I think it will have what I’m looking for. I like that it will allow up to two HDMI connectors, or one HDMI for the High Definition TV and the other (DVI) for the PC Monitor. That is all I’ll need because most of the other devices would be plugged into the TV.

My requirements also includes that there be a dual-tuner that only needs one input, which means I only need one coaxial cable, not two[Unconfirmed]. There is a $99 USB Tuner which has this feature, but since it is USB won’t include the HDMI output. If the Radeon HD also includes the Dual Tuner, which it may be only on the high end models, and also includes the requirement, then I will absolutely buy it.

Don’t really care about the GPU and playing games. The GPU would be useful in HD decoding for the TV and HD DVD formats it supports. One of the problems I had with the old All-in-Wonder is that it used the CPU for MPEG encoding. I think it would be useful if the GPU did the encoding instead. That may not be an option, but that is okay. Another of my requirements is that it does encoding of HD format, either Divx[confirmed] or H.264[unconfirmed], instead of MPEG 1 or 2[confirmed, newer AIW support MPEG 1, 2, and 4!]. Another TV Tuner meets this requirement, but doesn’t match my other requirements.

Hopefully, the Radeon HD has all of this, but if it has everything but the HD encoding, then I’ll be okay. There should be a free tool that I can use to convert to the format of my choice and can also be setup to do so automatically to save space.

I look forward to the pricing model and the final specifications.

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