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When the TV-ON-DEMAND button (above pause button) is pressed, either on the desktop or remote, the application quickly moves into time-shifting mode.
TV application itself
As you can see, many additional functions become available when running in time-shifting mode, particularly the control bars in the centre most part of the application.
Upon switching to time-shifting mode, the application immediately begins caching/recording the signal, and storing it temporarily on the hard disk (although it can be setup to save to disk), initially with no visible change and the signal appearing to be a live broadcast.
With the use of the lower control bar (red dots), you can now rewind and fast forward (up to the point were it is live again) the broadcast at your discretion, the further from the centre point, the faster the FF/Rewind, with speeds up to 16x playback rate.
The control bar above displays the broadcast in a track style format. You can simply pull the bar from the start of the broadcast (when the time-shifting mode was activated) all the way up to the live broadcast. As time goes by, this bar will fill up (blue region), with the larger amount of cache/hard drive space allocated to TV-ON-DEMAND determining the duration. This cached file can also be saved to disk if you so wish
Moving away from the intricacies of the operation, as a whole, the TV-ON-DEMAND functions are very well executed. Almost immediately after activating time-shifting mode, the broadcast reappears, as opposed to rival solutions, which suffer from delays of up to 10 seconds.
Also as mentioned earlier, the quality and time allowance of the TV-ON-DEMAND function is completely user-definable, meaning you can setup time-shifting to look identical to a live broadcast in terms of quality, or significantly lower quality, depending on a user's system performance (the higher the quality, the more demanding it is). I didn't notice any issues relating to performance whatsoever on a mid-range test system (specs noted in benchmark section of the article), although the impressive hardware iDCT and motion compensation engines of the RV250 core play a role in reducing CPU usage.
The user can also record any of these broadcasts outside of TV-ON-DEMAND using the Digital VCR Functions.
Recording TV
Upon pressing the record button, an additional window immediately appears on screen, and the record begins. This function is called on-touch-record, as it requires no naming of the file, quality selections, or time settings, it merely requires a single click and it begins.
Once the recording has actually started, you can then further configure the session, with the duration of the record being an option to select.
The time "remaining on disk" variable is very handy, and basically tells you how long you have left to record based on the current free hard drive space. Unlike TV-ON-DEMAND, Digital VCR space is not allocated, so caution must be exercised with the higher quality capture settings such as MPEG2 if space is an issue.
In relation to choice of capture format, applicable to both TV-ON-DEMAND and Digital VCR functions, there are a plethora of options available to the user.
One of the capture settings dialog boxes
You can simply select on of the many pre-determined formats, varying in sound and visual quality preference, or you can create a custom format with a specific preference to audio or visual quality, or bit rate for instance.
When creating a custom format, you are able to set resolution and encoding method, a specific bit rate, force a specific variable bit rate encoding mode, compression quality, and a multitude of sound qualities.
You can also tell the software to perform a number of compression related algorithms on the capture such as de-interlacing and inverse 3:2 pulldown.
To put simply, the range of options and settings regarding capture ATI have catered for with MMC7.9 is mesmerising, and rivals any professional PVR equipment.
After touching on many of the multimedia aspects of the software behind the All-In-Wonder 9000 Pro, it's time to lay focus on what has long since been considered the weak point of ATI cards, the drivers.
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