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It was worth going through setting up the All-In-Wonder before covering its usage for a couple of reasons. Firstly, products like the AIW, especially products featuring PVR facilities, definitely sell partly on their ease of use. They have to be easy to setup and maintain, since they basically replace your TV. Much more complicated than clicking a button on a remote handset and it becomes to lose its appeal. The first task was just using the AIW to watch some TV as a new user would. So channels detected, named and saved, it was time to give it a try.
Pressing the TV button on the RemoteWonder automatically launches the TV applet. If you have a TV connected to the 2nd output, EASYLOOK pops up and warns you about running EASYLOOK on two displays at once.
Clicking yes fires up your first saved channel in EASYLOOK mode, full screen on both heads.
GemStar+ enabled, the program name would display where it says "No Title".
Pressing the fullscreen button on the remote in EASYLOOK mode brings up current channel information. As you can see, EASYLOOK overlays the information over the top of the TV picture, with no slowdown. It's this slick interface that's the selling point of the All-In-Wonder for me, and the feature which helps it compete against standalone TV tuner packages that you can use with other graphics cards. A similar concept to the overlays used with Windows XP MCE and the UI used on PVR standalone units like TiVO, EASYLOOK makes the AIW a proper no keyboard, no mouse setup. Once past initial setup of course, you can use the remote for mouse duties once the RemoteWonder software is installed, however that's right at the very end of the software install sequence. It's not a no keyboard, no mouse setup from initial card install. Something to be expected however, until your OS gets native RemoteWonder drivers.
Apologies for the shaky camera work, I'm adjusting the volume in that shot.
Now, there's a fairly large bug here that I wasn't able to squash. It feels like it might be by design, I'll let you make up your mind. Using EASYLOOK with a monitor and TV out at the same time, TV on both displays, EASYLOOK overlays only ever appeared for me on the CRT monitor, never on the TV. No amount of swapping primary displays could fix that for me. However, with monitor off and the TV the only enabled output, EASYLOOK overlays showed up just fine.
Watching TV via a PC TV tuner, on a TV, is certainly counter intuitive, but it was an interesting experiment. I was keen to see what TV tuner gave the best picture quality. While the TV's own TV tuner won out, the quality from the 9800 Pro All-In-Wonder was certainly something to shout about, and it looked great.
What about watching DVD's or movie files such as DivX rips?
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