ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB - My New Favorite TV Tuner

The ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB for PC makes some nice breakthrough for a USB TV tuner. For starter, it is part of AMD's "combo" tuner-series, which is in fact a dual TV receiver except it's one of each: analog and digital. So, you can watch in NTSC while recording a channel on ATSC OTA or Clear QAM; likewise, you can watch a digital channel while recording an analog channel. This is certainly more flexible than the Pinnacle hybrid USB TV, which allows you to watch or record one channel at any given time. A problem with the 650 Combo USB is that you can't record two digital channels simultaneously. A simple workaround welcomed by AMD is to buy a second 650 tuner of course.

I was just giving a quick look at the specs and found out the analog tuner also supports 3D Comb Filter, Clear QAM, FM radio and hardware MPEG-2 encoder (for MCE compatibility) - all of which are absent previously on the TV Wonder 600. Look for the 650 Combo USB to hit store in mid-October for $149.