Usage and Problems
Key to a modern PC-based PVR is the user interface. The main goal is to not make it apparent what operating system is running. You want the PVR software to provide a clean, consistent, attractive full-screen user interface. This allows you to easily navigate between all the PVR features, set the PVR system up, add new timed recordings, access a program guide, browse your existing recordings and all the other features an under-the-TV PVR should allow you to do.The P7000's biggest failing is that it does none of those things. While the remote is able to launch the software in full-screen mode, then giving you basic start/stop/pause/seek controls over what's running, that's about all it does.
There's no full-screen, clean UI for managing the PVR features, like you'd find on a Windows Media Center PC, or something like Nebula Electronics' DigiTV.
You need a mouse, and realistically a monitor that allows you to see Windows dialog boxes and text, to setup and operate the P7000 and its software. You don't need either of those things on other systems which offer up a complete full-screen UI for everything, even initial tuning and setup.
So while the remote is good for basic functionality, the software, by nature of just being basic Windows, windowed themed applications with a token full-screen window mode, lets it all down.
Problems
Changing channels on the TV application causes Windows to experience a pregnant pause and a 100% CPU usage spike for a couple of seconds, while it locks on to the frequency you want. Not too bad in full-screen mode when you're doing nothing else, but if you're watching TV in a window, your other apps can appear to jitter and stutter.Of greater concern is the complete inability of the FM tuner to output audio that doesn't skip and pause when you do the slightest activity in Windows. Swapping application windows, scrolling the mouse in Internet Explorer or Mozilla, and scrolling in Word, among many other usage cases, causes very choppy audio, rendering it unlistenable.
Here's a sample of the audio quality while doing a little light browsing in Avant, a wrapper for the IE renderer that implements tabbed browsing (amongst other things). Radio 1's excellent Colin and Edith show is playing and I'm simply scrolling down a webpage and swapping between a few tabs.
Choppy audio (134KB) - Right click and save the target, or play in your browser if you have that capability. Windows Media Audio is required.
Urgh. The FM application is rendered unusable in my opinion, due to that issue. I'm not alone in experiencing it either, other reviews have noticed the same thing.
