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Hardware setup Connecting the TV signal One of the simplest steps of them all. You should locate the source of the broadcast that normally inputs into your TV (e.g. Rooftop Antenna or set top box) and plug it into the equivalent port on your TV card. You may wish to use a splitter box so that you can still send the signal to your TV as well as the PC.
Connecting your PC to the TV There are only a few ways of connecting your media PC to your TV and here is the order of preference; choose the highest that your TV supports: - HDTV connectors For users in Europe, ATI’s recently released AIW X800XT comes with a SCART output, which is preferred over the S-video output. Software: Operating system: There are two operating systems worth considering for your new multimedia system, Windows XP and Windows MCE 2005. Let us look at MCE 2005 first. Windows MCE 2005 MCE2005 is basically Windows XP SP2 with a comprehensive media suite built in. When you first boot up, you’ll see the normal XP style desktop (with a slightly new theme/picture) however, it all works in the same way as XP. Opening the start menu shows that there is a Media Centre Option, which when selected, launches the Media Centre software.
The software used by Microsoft is very simple and the set-up can be completed, even by amateurs, in a matter of minutes.
It allows you to configure your TV card, display, speakers as well as talking you through the TV guide functions. Following the completion of the setup, you are presented with the main menu from which you can access all of the functions. As far as the TV card compatibility goes, I’ve yet to find a recent, mainstream branded card that does not work correctly with MCE2005. We recommend the AIW Radeon for use with the MCE; however, if you would prefer a stand-alone card, then we would have to recommend an ATI Theatre 550 Pro based product. It’s not the cheapest on the market, but when comparing images created by the T550 to competing products, specifically from a less than perfect source, the T550 produces the crispest and clearest image. The chances that you’ll spend most of your time in front of the TV, DVD or audio sections of the software are high and thankfully, all of these options are very easy to use. The layouts are intuitive, clear and all functions can be controlled through the MCE remote, which comes bundled with the OS. Media Centre also includes limited DVD burning functionality to allow you to save your recordings in DVD format. Two warnings though. First of all, in order for many of the display features within Media Centre to work, such as watching TV, you need to install some DVD playback software. This introduces the components needed for MPEG-2 playback and enables the feature within the Media Centre Application. Having tested numerous DVD software applications, my preference is the new Cyberlink PowerDVD 6 bundle. On my system, it gives the best image, although WinDVD, NVDecoder and ATI’s DVD decoder are not far behind. The second thing you should be aware of is that TV recordings within MCE use their own unique file format (DVR-MS) which is an MPEG-2 based format; however, many applications do not recognize it when it comes to converting. WindowsXP You shouldn’t need me to tell you what XP is, right? No? Good. If you decide to install XP rather than MCE2005, and you’ve followed our specifications of recommended components, then you’ll be looking at running your multimedia tasks through ATI’s Multimedia Centre. We’re well aware of the visual limitations of MMC. It does indeed look dated, but as far as functionality goes, there’s simply no other package on the market that does as much or does it as well. The TV functionality provides good quality and is highly configurable, with regards to display and recording settings. The Library function lets you easily convert your files between formats and manage them without issue, while the suite as a whole is completely stable. When experimenting with the competition, I always found a feature, which I used in MMC, was missing in the other suites.
The one feature which is a must have, and that many other software packages lack, is the ability to pause recording. Basically, what happens is when you start to record a TV show and you reach the adverts, you just hit the pause button and recording halts. When the adverts are finished, you can then begin recording again by repressing the pause button and you end up with one file that features no commercials. Not only is this preferable from a space saving point of view, but it also makes authoring your DVDs much easier, as you don’t need to cut out the adverts at that stage, which is much more time consuming than a simple click in MMC. The strength of the MMC program provided by ATI is the sole reason why we chose the AIW cards in our recommended specs, rather than stand-alone products, which use inferior software. An example of one such product is PowerCinema. We urge you to stay far away from any TV card that is bundled with it, unless you plan to use the TV card with MCE2005. An example of missing functionality in the program is that you cannot save TV broadcasts to any drive other than C, so unless it’s massive, you will run out of space rather quickly. Additional Software: No doubt, you’ll have a bundle of software on your PC that you will also want on your media centre, (like your CD burning software of choice and your favorite games) but there are a few pieces of software, which I prefer to install on the media system. DivX player (XP users only): As mentioned above, ATI’s interface for MMC is a bit dated, so I always take it upon myself to install DivX player as it’s a little nicer to look at. ATI’s file player will play DivX files as well if you don’t want to use the aforementioned player.
PowerDVD 6 Again, it’s an aesthetics thing (for XP users) and ATI’s DVD playback software works just as well, it just doesn’t look as nice. MCE users will need this software (or similar) to enable TV and DVD playback/recording.
Sonic MyDVD Studio Deluxe. Whether you are using the MCE2005 or XP, Sonic MyDVD is an invaluable tool for creating DVD’s from your recorded TV or other video source. Of all the DVD creation tools on the market, I found this to be by far the easiest to use. DVD creation from recorded TV takes just a few clicks, menu options are plentiful and the suite features one must have function: Fit-to-DVD. Using MyDVD, you can drag numerous files into the application and providing they total less than 4 hours for a single layer DVD or less than 7.25 hours for a dual layer DVD, the software will re-encode the files to fit appropriately. This means you get the best possible quality on your final product. MyDVD’s other high point is that it supports a huge number of file formats and will happily accept MCE2005’s DVR-MS format just as well as MPEG-2 and AVI files.
Contacts: Reviewer:
Stuart
"Veridian3" Davidson
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