GUIDE PLUS/EAZYSHARE

The ALL-IN-WONDER 9600’s TV tuning capabilities wouldn’t be complete without Gemstar’s GUIDE PLUS+ electronic programming guide (EPG) software. GUIDE PLUS+ is like your newspaper’s TV listings on steroids. With GUIDE PLUS+ you can view your current TV listings, or your listings for the week.

Gemstar setup

TV listings in grid mode

GUIDE PLUS+ provides programming descriptions (where available), just like your cable or satellite provider would, in addition you can browse television listings by a variety of categories. Say for instance, you want to browse for certain sports or an individual actor. You can also use the search feature to find all instances of a particular show; this is perfect for syndicated television programming like The Simpsons or X-Files.

Program description

Here you can see all upcoming episodes

Setup is a snap, simply enter your zip code and based on that answer, GUIDE PLUS+ will ask you which cable service you use. Once you’ve selected your provider GUIDE PLUS+ will download the television listings (which are updated weekly) and launch itself. GUIDE PLUS+ is completely free for ALL-IN-WONDER users, there are no setup or monthly fees to pay to use the service.

GUIDE PLUS+ is more than just a TV guide however. You can use the GUIDE PLUS+ software to record all your television programming for a given week, just like a TiVo unit. Or, if you’d like to record an entire season’s worth of episodes, SCHEDULE+ (which is integrated directly into GUIDE PLUS+) can be used.

Sorting programming by actor

Or sort for sport

Another capability that the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 shares with TiVo is the ability to timeshift, ATI refers to this feature as TV-ON-DEMAND. With timeshifting, you can step away from the TV without missing anything. Simply press the pause button on your REMOTE WONDER remote and the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 will automatically save the program you’re watching to your PC’s hard drive (based on video quality settings you’ve predefined). Then, when you come back, press play to see what you missed. You can fast forward or rewind through the content you’ve saved, or if you’d like to jump straight back to live TV you can do that too. This feature was used by numerous TiVo users during the infamous Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl this year.

EAZYSHARE

One of the ALL-IN-WONDER 9600’s cooler features is EAZYSHARE, which ATI recently added to its Multimedia Center software. The premise behind EAZYSHARE is simple: sharing the video content provided by your ALL-IN-WONDER card with other PCs within your home. EAZYSHARE essentially turns your ALL-IN-WONDER system into a video server, with the other PCs within your home network acting as clients. From the client machines you can watch TV, and timeshift, as long as you’re using a card built by ATI. Powered by ATI cards like those manufactured by Sapphire, Powercolor, ASUS and others won’t work with EAZYSHARE, and of course, graphics cards based on NVIDIA GPUs won’t work with EAZYSHARE.

In theory, this all sounds great but in practice we found EAZYSHARE’s instability to be such a hassle that the feature was essentially useless. ATI introduced EAZYSHARE in Multimedia Center 8.8, so we’re hoping they’ll be able to perfect it with a little more time. The other applications within Multimedia Center ran flawlessly.