TV/Recording/EPG

Sunday wouldnt be complete without SportsCenter

Poor OU

LSU about to score

Now that you’ve got all the hardware hooked up and the software installed, you’re ready to sit down and watch some TV on your PC! Again, InterVideo’s WinDVR 2.0 software is used for this task. Upon first bootup, WinDVR must be setup. This process includes scanning for television stations, which can be accomplished manually or via auto scan. The tuner supports up to 128 cable stations and the ability to fine tune the video signal for optimum quality.

SportsCenter breaking it down for us

Coach Stoops keeping his team in line

Now he is going after the ref

One aspect that we quickly realized was the slow responsiveness of the tuner. Changing channels was a little slower than ALL-IN-WONDER, as the lag between pressing the button to change the channel and the tuner actually performing this function was noticeably slower. This is even more frustrating when you factor in the crispness of the NVRemote’s buttons, you’re almost reminded of a nice Omnikey keyboard. We found that if we deliberately pressed the remote three times to change the channel in rapid succession, nine times out of ten it would only change the channel twice.

Stu Scott talking about Favre

On to CNN

US solider in Afghanistan

We were unable to get the second display to work properly with our installation, despite multiple attempts, so we were unable to confirm if the second display can be used for television output. For ATI’s ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO, the display is limited to the primary monitor.

Karzai has lots of security

See what we mean

Keyshawn back when he was with the Jets

Unlike ATI, NVIDIA doesn’t offer a built-in 10-foot interface, this is accomplished by ATI’s EAZYLOOK feature. EAZYLOOK cleans up the interface and uses bigger text that is easier to read from long distances.

In essence, the TV tuner does a good job of performing its primary function, watching TV, but it lacks some of the over-the-top features found in ALL-IN-WONDER such as THRUVIEW and closed caption search.

Electronic Programming Guide

For WinDVR 2, InterVideo has partnered with TitanTV for its electronic programming guide (EPG). TitanTV is a free Web-based programming guide that provides television listings for a large number of areas. The only problem with this implementation is that TitanTV isn’t much more powerful than going to tvguide.com and looking at the listings manually. For instance, whereas ALL-IN-WONDER/Gemstar downloads programming listings to your PC’s hard drive (much like a TiVo would) TitanTV doesn’t. Launching the EPG merely takes you to TitanTV’s website with the listings for your area/provider you’ve pre-selected. This means you’ll really need a broadband internet connection that’s always on for the best experience, especially if you use TitanTV to schedule your recordings.

Old Ditka footage

TitanTV interface

Channel surfing with the TV player

You can manually schedule recordings as well, but this is little more than setting your VCR for a specific television station, time, and date circa ten years ago, as the program information isn’t tied into the interface.

Fortunately, TitanTV does provide search functionality. So for instance, if you want to find all the instances of X-Files you can do a search for “X-Files” or even the actors such as David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.