Software
Being an NVTV product, the software that drives the hardware is NVIDIA's own ForceWare Multimedia, coupled with Ulead MovieFactory 2.5 SE for DVD authoring for any captured video. Installing the software comes after installing the hardware, so make sure you have both card and USB remote receiver physically connected before you start installing the software.
The software can be used in a window like is shown above, or full screen if you're outputting to a television. It's counter intuitive to use a PC as your TV tuner, outputting to a TV, but the hardware doesn't do tuner passthrough.
The sections are well labelled so it's clear what you can do. The software requires setup upon first use, but's it's incredibly intuitive to get your TV channels tuned. Click Autoscan, wait a short while, rename and reorder the detected channels if necessary, done.
The TV player section then lets you watch tuned channels. Setting recording quality and playback options are simple. Here's the playback options dialog.
You can choose hardware acceleration using standard DX9 interfaces, meaning any DX9-compliant graphics card can be used with NVTV, including ATI's Radeon family. Display type can be chosen and deinterlacing options can be set, the code probably borrowed from Dscaler, but I can't confirm. If it does, that's no bad thing since Dscaler's software deinterlacing algorithms and performance are very good.
The video and music share a very WMP9-like interface. It's not brilliant for full screen operation. For example, choosing your video files to watch on a television with it's low resolution and less than pin-sharp focus is a pain, especially given that you have to do it using the mouse pointer and the poor directional pad of the supplied remote. A low point.
The picture viewer also shares the same WMP9 look-and-feel. Slideshows of your pictures can be shown on your display device but it's all very fiddly in practice.
With ForceWare Multimedia being intrinsically tied to WMP9, it's no great surprise to see it use a similar set of interfaces, but it's hardly optimal, especially on a television.
Network Sharing
Network sharing of captured content and live television is one of the biggest features the ForceWare software possesses. Allowing any connected clients to view live television from the base NVTV source is a boon for many potential applications, and using it as a remote video streaming server is notable too. It's simple to setup and the client software is intuitive. A high point and one of the value features.
DVD Authoring
Ulead MovieFactory is a simple DVD authoring package for creating MPEG-2 DVDs from captured TV or S-Video-attached vdeo, that'll then play back on standard DVD decks.
Testing it out with a few hours of captured television in medium quality, burned to a DVD-R disk, showed no problems.
You can edit the captured TV or video using Ulead VideoStudio 7, also supplied.
It's a simple time-line editor with some basic fades and transitions, a title and audio editor and some overlay functions. It's no Holywood post-production facility but it's competent enough to create simple DVDs you won't be embarassed by.
Summary
Nothing earth shattering, my first encounter with the ForceWare Multimedia was mixed. Problems with the TV tuning and the software refusing to let Windows XP shutdown properly 90% of the time tarnished things somewhat. It feels very polished until you hit the odd bug, which makes the realisation that the usability is nowhere near something like myHTPC, or even ATI's EASYLOOK, a hard pill to swallow. Competent hardware with software that needs to catch up.Looking forward, I'm sure that'll happen, but until then, I'd possibly use another interface to the hardware for serious PVR usage. The interface has too many issues for that.
The network streaming is commendable, but other packages do it just as well.
