The AIW VE comes with a 125-channel cable-ready TV Tuner. What this means is that if you have cable TV, up to 125 channels can be seen. I don't have cable TV, however. For purposes of this review, I used a RCA 45db TV Tuner which gets excellent reception for my area (I'm near an airport and every time a airplane flies overhead, the picture gets fuzzy). Note this tuner is different from the previous tuner I used in my AIW 9700 Pro review. The signal reception is twice as good as the previous tuner.

Installation of the TV tuner is easy. After the drivers are installed, simply hit the TV button on the MultiMedia Center taskbar. At this point, a initialization wizard pops up. After choosing the country, whether you have cable or antenna, hit the auto scan button. The AIW VE detected channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18, 22, 28, 30, 34, 40, 46, 48, 52, 56 and 58. Those are the local non-cable TV stations in my area. At this point you can set a password for Parental Control. Anytime you as a parent want to block your child's programming, you set it here. The next window is the Audio set-up window. From here you select what audio source your TV tuner uses when TV is played. The next window allows the user to select default capture format. The choices are ATI Digital VCR Format, Standard MPEG 1/2 Format, AVI Format and Windows Media Format.

TV playback is wonderful with the AIW VE. As noted earlier, the auto scan of the channels turned up all of the various non-cable channels in the area. Playback is just as good as any of the TV tuners made by ATI, and in some matters, it's better, because of the Theater 200 chip. Missing from this card

Recording TV is easy. There's a Scheduler that allows you to use the Guide+ Plus TV Listings to record upcoming shows up to one week in advance. Simply hit the TV Listings button, pick a show that you want to record and click the Record button. This is Pretty simple straightforward and painless. After the button is pushed, a window opens to select the record quality of the video. The choices are Custom, Video CD, Longer, Good, and DVD. Video CD records at a resolution of 352x240 NTSC (US televisions). 44.100 KHz, 16 Bit Stereo, or 1.13 Megabits/second. At this setting a 2 hour movie would take up to 1017Megabytes. Longer records video at 480x480 NTSC, 44.100 KHz 16 Bit Stereo, or 2.00 Megabits/second. At this setting, a 2 hour movie would take up to 1800 Megabytes. The Good setting records at 720x480. 44.100 KHz or 6.00 Megabytes/second. At this setting, a 2 hour movie would take up to 5400 Megabytes. The DVD setting records at 720x480, 48.000 KHz 16 Bit, Stereo or 8.00 Megabits per second. A 2 hour movie would take up to 7200 Megabytes at this setting.

So what does mean in actual practice? I recorded shows for 10 minutes with each of the different settings. The screen size I selected was Large, which more than doubles the recording size. The Video-CD setting took up 102,311 Kilobytes on a 10 minute record. The % of frames dropped at this setting was less than 1%. The Longer setting had a record size of 168 MB on a 10 minute record. The Good record took up 468 MB of hard disk space. Finally, the DVD record took up 612 MB of hard disk space. One might ask why I used only 10 minute records. Normally, I use the DVD record for shows and don't mess with the lower settings.