What’s New: Software

With the addition of DVB-T functionality on the hardware side ATI have a new application within MMC which handles the DVB-T interaction. The application is called DTV and is launched in the same way as the other components, by clicking the launch bar.

A setup wizard follows which is very similar to the one used by TV and it allows you to choose your recording settings and tune the channels. The channel tuning takes around 5 minutes and after that you are presented with the following interface which is similar in appearance to the rest of ATI MMC.

DTV works in TV-On-Demand mode and therefore the controls reflect this. As you can see from the following graphic you have pause, rewind and fast-forward on the left of the interface.

An additional feature of DTV is the ability to get channel/program information without an internet connection. On most TV products you require a guide application plus a connection to the internet from which you download the latest guide information. The ATI DTV application works differently as it receives limited information with the DVB-T broadcast such as the name of the channel, what’s on now and what’s on next. Additionally, the program information is grabbed by MMC and used for the recording filename and therefore the name used in media library.

Like TV, DTV also contains the screenshot function allowing you to capture still images of the broadcast and one touch record which allows you to record broadcasts with ease.

On the whole DTV works great, picture quality is excellent as is audio. Manipulating the broadcast with the TVOD functionality also works well and we experienced no issues with this functionality.

It’s not all peachy, there were a few minor issues with DTV; the first was the What’s on Now/Next isn’t running perfectly at this point. On occasion the feature started with a program name, for example “Lost” and if we remained watching until the next broadcast started (e.g. Friends) and then started a record the channel/program info would still state “Lost” rather than “Friends”. This meant that we had to manually name the recording. ATI are aware of this issue and it will no doubt be resolved in a future MMC build

We were also disappointed to see that one of the must have features of the TV application is currently missing from DTV. The feature we’re referring to is Pause Recording. If you are recording a broadcast within the TV application and an advertisement break starts there is a button on the recording panel which allows you to stop the recording and then restart at the end of the ad break. Therefore you have a very easy way of creating video files with no adverts where as with other multimedia solutions you would have to remove the adverts manually when the recording is complete. Currently DTV doesn’t have any pause recording button. We raised this concern with ATI and they are going to look at implementing this functionality in a future MMC.
The last minor issue we experienced was that by right clicking the DTV application and selecting hide controls, and then doing the same again we expected to see “Show Controls” instead it still stated “hide controls”.

The other new software feature is the ability to create simple DVD’s from within the Multimedia Centre Library application. This facility has been created by ATI in conjunction with Sonic who make the Excellent MyDVD.

DVD creation is actioned by clicking an icon within the library:

You then get some basic configuration options:

The display then splits in two and allows you to add files to the DVD contents list.

From there you select burn and then the application goes to create your DVD … simple. This functionality is a nice addition to the software suite and is ideal for novice users. If you are a more advanced user you would be better to invest in some stand alone DVD creation software as the configuration options available in these solutions are much more advanced than ATI MMC.

We did find a few issues with the DVD creation, firstly there is no preview of the menu styles so you don’t get to see what the final result is going to look like. Secondly there is no check if a blank DVD has enough space until the end of the transcoding so if you have video exceeding the maximum run time within the project you will end up wasting your time. Also the software automatically splits larger files into chapters and adds buttons to your menus, this means you can end up with pages and pages of chapter buttons . Intermittently we found the temporary files created during the transcoding were not deleted wasting valuable hard drive space, the only solution was to manually remove these files. All said, this feature does have merit and more importantly potential, right now it’s good for very basic creation however for the more advanced user it isn’t ideal …yet.

 

Previous: Whats New? Hardware

Next: Test System