Keeping it fed and watered
I/O, I/O, it's off to work we go! With Theater, tuner and a nice NxtWave, I/O! I/O, I/O, I/O! Sorry.Carrying on with the horrible puns, think of the AIW as the perfect woman. The AIW likes to share, you see. So if you give to it sufficiently, in terms of signals to tune and work with, it'll give you back plenty of ways to watch and listen.
Editorial suicide and inexcusable sexism aside, here's how a modern AIW goes about the business of I/O.
Cabling and Connectors
A custom cable attaches to the main I/O block connector. You'll have seen it before on HEXUS if you follow our AIW articles, but here it is again just incase.
That connector gives you Euro SCART and VGA analogue output, audio passthrough that sends line-out from your soundcard to the SCART output, and the usual ATI 'VIVO' connector for doing general I/O with the Theater 200. With a non-Euro AIW, your multi-block connector has an extra domino output connector instead.
Be aware that the picture above is just a stack of the dominos available from the HEXUS AIW Stash-O-Bits™. What you can see above is the composite, S-Video and audio dominos. Some are input only, some are output only, the user choosing which ones to use depending on their AIW needs.
Euro regions get one input, one output. North America gets those, and a component domino as well.
They use their component output dominos for display on high end TV sets. And regardless of connector options, you can either do AV input or output, but not both at the same time.
Lastly, Euro regions get a DVI-to-component adaptor with the AIW - for converting the sole DVI output into something that high-end displays can understand.
Summary
As with the previous AIW Radeon X800s on PCI Express, and the AIW Radeon X1800 XL, the AIW Radeon X1900 offers a large range of I/O options for AV. Capture and tuning can be done on TV (including DVB-T), FM radio, composite video, S-Video and stereo audio, largely achieved via the Theater 200 VP.Modern AIWs also possess formidable output options, with Euro SCART, DVI and VGA (with the latter pair capable of HD output, although without HDCP on the DVI output), joining what's available on the domino blocks.
Formal spec next, before a look at how the AIW performs.
