With the PC's ever broadening capabilities, one function that has seen increased interest is that of the PC Media Device. With concepts such a Home Theater PC's or Microsoft's Media Center software and initiatives PC's are increasingly being tasked to PVR (Personal Video Recorder) functionalities meaning the analogue to digital video encode quality and performance is very important for such operation. Earlier this year ATI introduced the Theater 550 PRO chip, a full MPEG encode solution, in an effort to address the needs of this market.

Here Beyond3D takes a look at a typical TV Tuner board solution using the Theater 550 PRO, looking at the quality of digital encode, as well as taking a look at the CPU overhead under various scenarios.