All-In-Wonder Software
I'm going to cheat here and not cover All-In-Wonder software features specifically. While I'd love to write about it again, little has changed since I looked at it in my 9800 Pro AIW review. MMC has seen a mainly bugfix upgrade to version 8.6 (8.5 was reviewed) and the RemoteWonder, ATI DVD decoder and the WDM capture drivers have all seen needed updates, but sadly offer no features I didn't cover before.I'll describe them briefly here to fill up a page, but please take a look at my original AIW article, along with others around the web, to get a proper overview of what you get. Criminal maybe, but it saves my time as well as yours.
MMC
MMC, or Multimedia Center, is at the heart of the All-In-Wonder software package. It gives you access to all the supported features, including the TV tuner, PVR features and video capture. It uses a slightly gaudy default interface that I've grown to despise. I wish it would use the default Windows themed widgets, or at least offer that option to the user. As it stands, you are forced to use a set of ATI provided skins for MMC, all of them pretty poor. However it's user skinnable, so no doubt there are good looking skins for MMC available with a little Google exercise.MMC lets you tune into any available television signals that you feed into the Philips tuner. It can then lock on to those channels, saving them for future use, just like a regular television. You can parentally control the tuned channels, offering digit based access to each one on an individual basis. You can also lock out channel groups which are user definable.
Tuning the channels then gives you access to the PVR features. PVR stands for personal video recorder, allowing you to use your All-In-Wonder like a TiVo or Sky+ device, recording shows on demand, timeshifting the recorded video so that you can pause live TV to use the loo or answer the phone, returning to the exact spot you left it. It stops short of being an adaptive system, able to learn your TV watching habits and record shows it thinks you might like, the recording schedule is entirely manual, but that's what systems like Snapstream are for. Any more value features added to MMC and Snapstream's creators would likely cry foul.
There's a range of capture formats available, each one selectable and easy to setup. MMC gives you rough indications of how much disk space is likely to be needed with each format.
Finally, you get easy one click/button access to the DVD player (superb, with near 100% GPU assist for decode and scaling) and media player. The media player is no substitute for something like Winamp or Windows Media Player 9, but RemoteWonder has plug-ins for applications like Winamp, allowing you to control them from the remote.
Other software
You get some limited video capture software on the Hercules CD, although it's no Adobe Premiere. Better than Windows Movie Maker though, quite easily. Along with the CATALYST driver set, some ATI graphical demos and essential stuff like DirectX 9, the CD gives you everything you need to get started.However since I'm not covering the AIW software features in any great depth and I've only just hinted at what's available, again, please take a look at the original review if you're unsure what AIW gets you. I'm doing it an injustice here with my brief commentary, it really is that good. Wait until you see the price later.
Onto system setup before I move on to the benchmarks.
