[Lab Bench Online]
EiED Online>> Building A Multimedia Home Control Center, Part 1
William Wong
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ED Online ID #13330 |
August 21, 2006
The Windows installation was uneventful but long as most initial installations are. It required installation of the DVD support applications, ATI TV Wonder Pro applications and SetPoint for the Logitech input devices. After a sufficient number of reboots the installation was complete.
I then installed Xandros Desktop Home Edition Premium leaving about 300Gbytes for the shared partition. Xandros handled the dual boot support nicely. I plan on trying Linux out with both the open source MythTV support and SageTV. For now I concentrate on ATI’s standard Windows support.
Operation with the Sharp HDTV was good. The resolution is not as high as say a 19-inch LCD monitor but it was more than sufficient to use most office applications as well as web browsing. The system is primarily intended for PVR use and home control so high resolution is less important than when using the system for large spreadsheets.
Likewise, the VIA C7 processor is fast but it does not compare in speed with the top-of-the-line, dual core 64-bit Intel or AMD processors. On the other hand, the C7 uses significantly less power allowing this multimedia system to be extremely quiet. The Western Digital hard disk and DVD writer are the noisiest parts of the system and they are whisper quiet already.
PVR Party ATI includes support for a personal video recorder (PVR) as part of both the ATI TV Wonder Pro and ATI HDTV Wonder products. Each comes with a wireless RF remote that includes a USB-based transceiver. This means you do not have to worry about where remote’s receiver is placed as you do with an IR-based remote. I installed the Belkin F5U237v1 Hi-Speed USB 2.0 7-Port Hub (see Figure 14) at this point so I could plug in the ATI remote transceiver.
The ATI software package includes their Multimedia Center 9 and the GemStar scheduler. The multimedia support includes a TV viewer application that supports TV recording as well as TV-on-demand (HDTV-version only). The latter lets you pause, replay and restart a program. The DTV (see Figure 15) is easy to use but a little Spartan. Still, you can do neat things like create a video magazine, schedule recordings or watch TV using the adapter. In general, I wound up using the interface primarily for recording and playback and using Sharp’s HDTV directly for basic TV viewing although the TV-on-demand was fun.
Both TV boards support 125 analog channels. The HDTV product supports 70 HDTV channels. The latter also lets you select from multiple audio streams when available. The composite video inputs also allow recording from other devices such as a Smarthome Day/Night Wireless Camera. The ATI software includes basic video editing and the ability to burn CDs and DVDs. It is not on par with a full blown editing package like Adobe’s Premiere but it is more than sufficient for what most of us do with typical TV recordings.
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