Summary
The P7000's software is heavily tied to Microsoft's Windows Media 9 technology, both in function implementation using the WM9 APIs, but also in look and feel.TV Tuner
Recognise the interface style? The fact that the P7000 is so closely tied to WM9 means the interface style makes a lot of sense.
The applications, supplied by GID for Prolink, share an interface for setting up recordings, PVR style.
A simple recording dialog lets you set the details for the television you wish to capture. Setting Watch/Listen only simply changes the channel for you at the requisite time, to save you doing it manually.
General properties exist for setting a wide range of possible options such as window style, the deinterlacing algorithm used (including some DScaler filters) and the capture format and quality for screenshots.
Recording and time shifting properties let you set things like recording quality, disk buffer size for time shifting and recording buffer sizes.
It's all standard stuff. The TV tuner simply scans the entire frequency range that the device supports (with optional frequency hints based on your location) and asks you to name the channels it finds.
FM Tuner
More WMP9-style interface shenanigans for the radio tuner. It shares the same recording setup interface as the TV tuner, just it loads your tuned radio channel list into the dialog instead.
To tune the radio, you simply launch a wizard which scans the FM frequency range that the Philips tuner supports, asking you to name channels along the way.
eDrive
eDrive is the implementation of a simple set of COM components that can control the GDI tuners, allowing you to script their usage and do some simple object automation. The main eDrive function is to scan your Outlook inbox for emails that tell eDrive to schedule TV for recording. The theory is you email a set of commands to yourself, eDrive sees them and does the necessary voodoo for the recording setup.In practice, it seemed to work fine, scheduling everything it was asked to schedule. You can set it up so it will only process commands that come in from certain email addresses, allowing you to filter who's able to send commands to eDrive, so you can't have your hard disk filled with episodes of Baywatch by a malicious aquiantance that knows you have a P7000 with eDrive running.
The most exciting part of eDrive is that the COM interfaces are fully documented and other software can easily drive the tuners using them, allowing third party support for the tuners from other software developers.
