Video Quality and Performance
Video quality, without any qualitative means to assess it outside of watching it with my own eyes (for now), appears to be very good for a product at OmniChrome's price point. It does just as well in my set of reference video clips as the TV tuner and software provided by recent ATI All-In-Wonder products based on the Theater 200 video processor. So it seems like S3 are doing quite a bit of work on analogue video sources on the GPU, to clean it up and make it presentable. The GPU features HDTV output and using an old ADC convertor to bridge a HDTV output signal over RGB, to VGA, showed good quality on an LCD display.However, non-HDTV-native recordings are simply upscaled to fit the HDTV resolution you're running, introducing quality problems inherent in adding detail that simply wasn't there in the original video. The upscaling quality is subjectively poor, creating blocky output video and some odd block shimmering effect that made the video hard to watch. Other software scalers do it much better.
Video quality on OmniChrome was good throughout, apart from when asked to do non-HDTV video output to a HDTV display. That part of the package is poor, in this reviewer's eyes. That's something that can be tweaked in software however and I have faith in S3's ability to fix it.
Performance wise, TV capture at any of the quality settings resulted in sub-35% CPU usage at all times, even when changing channels and at the highest quality, on an Athlon 64 system.
