Showshifter 2

Modern PCs have evolved into powerful home entertainment centres, capable of playing DVD movies, recording TV shows, along with managing music and photo collections. The only problem is they're not as easy to use as domestic appliances.

Showshifter 2 intends to change all this by handling all the above from a single, easy-to-use Windows interface. Showshifter allows you to watch and record TV, play DVDs or listen to your music.

It can synchronise with online electronic programming guides and pause live TV. The latest version can make slideshows of digital images.

It all sounds impressive until you remember a well-equipped PC can already do this. What Showshifter offers, however, is a means to tie all these capabilities together with a single, consumer-styled front end, and some neat features to boot.

Costing just £31.36 (£47.04 for the Pro version), Showshifter 2 is affordable, but you'll need additional software and hardware to make the most of its features.

To watch DVDs you'll need to install a DVD decoder. To watch and record television, you'll need compatible TV tuner and video-capture facilities; sadly Showshifter does not work with digital television (DVB) cards.

Compatible products are listed on Showshifter's website and we recommend checking the full system requirements for the best experience.

To fully test Showshifter we built a PC using an Athlon XP 2000+, 256MB of Ram, an 80GB Seagate Barracuda IV hard disk, and an ATI All-In-Wonder 8500DV card for TV and video-capture facilities; the OS was Windows XP Pro and Power DVD XP was used as a decoder.

Showshifter's first neat feature becomes apparent during installation as it synchronises with the TV-TV listings website. Once your free account has been configured, you click on the description of a show, and mark it for Showshifter to record.

Users of the Pro version can then electronically register for a DivX Pro licence. DivX Pro is an Mpeg-4 compressor/decompressor (codec), which can make high-quality recordings with smaller file sizes than Showshifter's standard codecs.

Showshifter presents a single clean screen consisting of a video window with five configuration buttons at the top and seven options down the side; you can toggle to full-screen video using the right-mouse button.

The main options provide controls for TV viewing and recording, watching DVDs, listening to audio, accessing the online schedule, or viewing digital images.

Showshifter is easy to operate. The facility to pause live TV works well, as does the TV-TV integration, which saves the recordings with the show's name and date.

Where Showshifter really scores, though, is with its single bold interface, which also looks fine on a TV, although the ultimate quality here depends on your video card's outputs.

The purple interface looks better than in previous versions, and it's great to have decent realtime support for DivX Pro, although it demands a decent CPU. There are improved DVD and CD playback facilities, and support for multiple aspect ratios. The new digital image viewer is good, but no better than the facility built into Windows XP.

On the downside, TV recording is highly resource-intensive. Viewing photos while recording TV resulted in dropped frames on our system, while DVD playback stopped it altogether. To be fair, this is a limitation of the PC and Showshifter does warn you.

That said, Showshifter is one of the few solutions available if you want a decent unified front end to handle all types of home media.

Windows XP Media Centre may offer similar features with slicker graphics, but it's only available pre-installed on a handful of systems in the US. Prospective users should check out www.snapstream.com.

Products such as Tivo are easier to use for timeshifting TV, but if you're intent on using a PC for managing multiple home media files, Showshifter is recommended. Just bear in mind you'll need to install the right components, be prepared for a little tweaking and accept the limitations.

Contact: Home Media Networks
www.showshifter.com

System requirements

• 800MHz Pentium III
• 64MB of Ram
• 300MB of free disk space
• Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP
• DirectX-compatible sound card
• DVD playing software and compatible TV tuner/video capture card