Review: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro All-In-Wonder

PVR stands for Personal Video Recorder. Basically the tuner hardware on the All-In-Wonder, along with software to make it programmable and interface with publically available television programming guides, conspire together to give you a fully programmable video recorder on your PC. Along with cool features like TV-on-Demand, you get the odd feature a good VCR won't give you, but it stops short of full blown PVR solutions, as peddled by the likes of TiVo.

So, you are able to schedule automatic recording of any TV channel you have setup, recurring or one shot, at any time of the day or night, providing your PC is on. How's that done from MMC?

On the TV Setup dialog, choosing the Schedule tab lets you add a new scheduled TV recording to your list of PVR recorded shows. It would be nice if you could schedule shows using the RemoteWonder, but it didn't appear possible. Pointing and clicking only, and while possible with the remote, it's suboptimal. Choose Create New to start things off.

Then it really is a simple matter of following the wizard. It takes you through choosing a date and time, a channel, duration to record for and whether you want it to recur, for taping a daily or weekly show. ATI's literature makes good mention of the GemStar+ program guide, and this presumably ties in with the PVR facilities for setting up recurring records. The pointing and clicking of the setup described here is definitely sub optimal, probably my pet peeve about the whole All-In-Wonder experience. As long as the GemStar+ guide is UK aware (or at least aware of your location) and available through EASYLOOK overlays, I'd be happy. As it was, no GemStar+ software shipped with the review unit.

Here's a few more shots from the PVR recording wizard before we move on to using the All-In-Wonder's main features properly, post-setup.