ATI's HDTV Wonder - Bringing DTV to your PC

HDTV Wonder & DTV Player - Quality Upgrade

You may notice that in the DTV player, you get black bars in the window; this is because not all content broadcasted is actually HDTV content. Commercials, generally speaking, are not in HDTV resolutions, but they are in some sort of a DTV resolution (either EDTV or SDTV), so broadcasters have to add in black bars to maintain a native HDTV resolution. This is why you get black bars in the window sometimes. This rule applies to DTV programs that are also in EDTV or SDTV resolutions. If you own an actual HDTV set, you don't see these black bars because the HDTV manufacturer includes coding that manipulates the image into the native 16:9 HDTV resolution.

Technically, commercials are converted from an analog format to a digital format, but they look better in a DTV environment because analog viewing generally has noise/interference that makes the signal look worse. You can see the difference particularly when you get to instances of commercials using bright colors.

Keep in mind that we are capturing a HDTV screenshot at the native 1080i resolution (16:9 widescreen) with a roughly 65% to 71% signal strength, and analog TV streams via analog cable at the standard 640 x 480 (4:3 ratio) with a ATI All-in-Wonder 9600 Pro on another system. If you are watching TV full screen with the TV player at 1280 x 1024 on your computer monitor, the computer scales it upward, which is another reason why TV looks poor on a computer. If you watch DTV on your computer, you are most likely scaling down because at 1080i, the signal is being broadcasted at like, 1920 x 1080. This is the same effect that you get when you start with a picture at 800 x 600 and try to either enlarge it or make a thumbnail.

DTV coverted commercial

Analog format commercial

DTV converted commercial
Click to enlarge.

Analog format commercial
Click to enlarge.

Analog converted to digital programs also follow the same rule. People look better and more distinguishable, but you still will run into the bar issue with analog to DTV converted programs.

DTV converted program

Analog format program

DTV converted program
Click to enlarge.

Analog format program
Click to enlarge.