DCAWD.com

The days of a universal laptop TV tuner are almost upon us, as CrestaTech begin sampling their CrestaTV “universal broadband receiver”. Packing not only support for DVBT, ATSC, Cable QAM, NTSC and PAL TV standards, the CrestaTV also receives FM radio and features a GPS receiver, and could allow travellers to watch TV on their notebooks no matter where in the world they are.

The CrestaTV chipset uses a combination of hardware and software for its tuning, as well as linking the GPS to the TV so that it intelligently searches for the most likely local channels first. No word on when we might expect to see it in production notebooks, nor how much it might add to the cost, but manufacturers have access to the reference boards now.

VIA's looking to deliver dual-HDMI and more in its next integrated Mini-ITX solution, the VB8003, which also packs DVI and VGA ports, as well as an LVDS output, meaning it could control five displays at once (though with only four discrete signals). It uses the Trinity Platform with a 1.6GHz Nano processor, a VX800 Media System Processor, and an integrated S3 GPU, all paired with up to 4GB of memory. 1080p playback is said to be easily handled, with the system supporting resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600