Graphics card supplier SAPPHIRE Technology has just launched a new TV tuner card - the SAPPHIRE HD 5570 XtendTV card.
The SAPPHIRE HD 5570 XtendTV card is a single slot PCI-Express graphics card with 1GB of GDDR5 memory and HDMI and DVI outputs ? and a built in programmable TV tuner. Connected to a standard TV antenna signal, it will receive and decode all of the local free to air TV and radio stations. Just as with a regular TV tuner, users can watch TV on the host PC using Media Center ? record, save and playback programs at will.
Installing the FlexiStream software on the PC in which the card is installed also enables the PC as a streaming server and users can remotely watch all of their home TV programmes using the XtendTV client on a remote PC or laptop.
Based on FlexiTV and FlexiStream technologies from Mirics, the SAPPHIRE XtendTV solution uses the Accelerated Parallel Processing (stream processing) capability of the on-board HD 5570 graphics chip to decode the TV signals and to compress the stream for viewing over the internet.
The HD 5570 is a member of the SAPPHIRE HD 5000 series which is supported by AMD's Catalyst DirectX 11 WHQL certified graphics driver. This generation of hardware delivers support for all of the key Microsoft DirectX 11 level features including DirectCompute 11 instructions, hardware Tessellation and multi-threaded communications with the system CPU. It also supports Accelerated Parallel Processing, accelerating supported applications such as video transcoding and rendering tasks by executing instructions on the GPU architecture rather than the system CPU.
All members of the SAPPHIRE HD 5570 series have an on board hardware UVD (Unified Video Decoder) reducing CPU load and delivering smooth decoding of Blu-ray and HD DVD content for both VC-1 and H.264 codecs, as well as Mpeg files. In the SAPPHIRE HD 5000 series the UVD has been enhanced to be able simultaneously to decode two 1080p HD video streams and to be able to display HD video in high quality with Windows Aero mode enabled. It supports HDMI 1.3a with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.