Hercules All In Wonder Radeon 8500DV

Everything that drives all that mighty hardware in the Radeon 8500DV is located in the “ATI Multimedia Center”. The main functionality sort after in the multimedia center is the ATI TV-Player, DVD Player, VCD Player, CD Player, File Player, and the Media Library. In contrast to the Multimedia Center offered a few years back, the new 7.5 version certainly shows great promise. ATI certainly have put in a great deal of effort to this release of the Multimedia Center.

The TV Player offers pretty much the same features as before, however the overall look has been changed considerably. Furthermore MPEG-2 encoding is also offered as a new codec, which was not included before. MPEG-2 offers better compression capability than MPEG-1.

The reception quality of TV-channels will of course depend on your location, and it cannot be guaranteed whether or not you’d be able to get any channel for that matter due to poor signal strength in certain areas. I tried hooking up a indoor antenna with a booster as well, but still couldn’t get a decent picture. Next I installed our cable TV box into the card and it worked perfectly with no flaws at all. So for all those with cable TV connections need not have to worry about any poor reception issues.

A cool new feature I found with the TV player is that it’s able to blend in with the desktop. There was a similar feature in former AIW cards as well, but it wasn’t exactly what you would call blend-in. This new feature allows you to adjust the transparency level of the TV, so now you can watch TV and do some other work at the same time. Now I can think of many instances where this feature would really come in handy, but I’ll leave that to your imagination.

I’m also impressed with the TV on Demand feature which allows users to take a break while watching normal TV. All you need to do is hit the pause button and once you return simply un-pause and it’ll start playing from the location you paused it. TV On Demand was a feature that was introduced along with the Radeon 8500 All In wonder card.

The TV capturing capability of the card never seems to put me down. I have captured around three full length movies and I didn’t notice any kind of quality drops at all.

For best TV picture quality the 8500DV is equipped with ATI’s Video Immersion II Technology. Here’s an extract from the specs from ATI.

“ATI’s VIDEO IMMERSION™ II technology integrates industry-leading digital video features, including advanced adaptive de-interlacing algorithm, temporal filtering, and video gamma enhancement for unprecedented video quality and integrated digital TV decode capability.”

Basically by offering temporal de-interlacing we’re offered better blending schemes to reduce de-interlacing artifacts.

The DVD Player also has a much nicer look than before, however there aren’t any noticeable new changes in its functionality. The DVD Player was quite impressive really and it’s always nice to have a decent free DVD player in the machine.

Another new addition is the Media Library which automatically lists the files you have captured. It offers various sorting schemes as well and I’m sure you’d find the Media Library a very welcome feature if you deal with a lot of media capturing.