PC-based DVR gets PCI performance from USB

I admit that I don't watch all that much television. So it wasn't really familiar with the ATI TV Wonder 650 product. I know about DVRs, but I really wasn't aware that the ATI Wonder 650 fell into the digital video recorder (DVR) category.

Like most products that I take apart, I put the ATI Wonder 650 through its paces first. That gives me a feel for the end-user experience, as we all know there's a lot more to a product than the chips that are on the board. Oftentimes, it's the software and/or the user interface that determine a product's success.

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I was pleasantly surprised when I plugged the ATI Wonder into my PC. Note that it connected to my PC, rather than my TV. At one end, it took the coaxial cable from my cable provider. At the other end, through USB, it connected to my PC. The scuttlebutt on such products was that they either required a higher speed interface, such as Firewire, or they provided low-quality video. I'm happy to report that the quality of the video transferred through the USB port was more than adequate.

I came to learn that that realization was the key to the design, at least from a usability perspective. Users demand the simple plug-and-play afforded by USB. Anything more complex often results in a returned product.

For ATI, now a division of AMD, the Wonder 650 is the first product to feature the hardware encoding technology needed to output television signals to a PC through USB. The product was designed about two years ago, and hit the shelves in stores a little over a year ago. The actual design cycle was about seven months from first conception to manufacture.