Nvidia Personal Cinema

Nvidia Personal Cinema is a combination of hardware and software that provides TV reception and recording, including timeshifting features, DVD playback and video capture and editing from a VCR, camcorder, or another analog source.

This pre-production model is based on a GeForce2 MX400 TwinView card with 64MB of DDR memory and dual-VGA monitor outputs. Unusually, the TV tuner is not mounted on the card but resides in a separate 'VIVO module', a small box finished in translucent lime plastic. This connects to the graphics card with a lengthy green nine-pin cable, and in addition to the TV or cable connector sports S-Video and composite-in and out sockets, and line-in and out sound connections.

The VIVO box also houses an IR receiver, which works with the supplied remote to do much more than flip channels. Having the aerial connection and IR receiver in the box means you can position it away from the PC for more convenient remote operation.

At least you could, were it not for the fact that the line-out connector needs to be connected to the line-in port on your sound card with a short audio cable. So inevitably the box sits, frog-like, on top of your processor box.

Installation and setup is relatively simple. Copies of InterVideo's WinDVD and WinDVR for DVD and TV viewing, and MGI's VideoWave 4.0 SE video-editing application, all come bundled. Initially, WinDVR wouldn't recognise the VIVO, even though it was plugged in, its power light was glowing and an LED flashed when we fired the remote at it. Reinstalling the application and drivers sorted the problem.

The first task with a TV tuner card is to autoscan for available channels. WinDVR makes things easy by ensuring that the country, tuning mode and video standard are set correctly to begin with. We had real trouble, however, in completing the autoscan process without WinDVR crashing the machine. Eventually we were able to scan sufficient channels to test the features.

It's only fair to say that these kinds of problems are inevitable with pre-production hardware.

WinDVR provides a surf mode which allows you to watch a still image thumbnail grid of all channels at the same time. A single click on a thumbnail provides live video with sound for a few seconds, and double-clicking selects that channel for viewing.

WinDVR offers three quality modes - good, better and best. Poor, average and just about watchable would be more accurate descriptions.

This is not merely a criticism of nVidia Personal Cinema; recording quality is something that needs radical improvement in all TV cards. The Best setting records MPEG-2 video at 352 x 576 resolution. Although the playback is smooth, the image quality is markedly worse than the original. As a result, you may prefer to fall back on your conventional VCR for feature films and the football.

This also applies to the time-shifting functions. While it's great to be able to pause for a tea break, watch an instant replay and skip forward past the ads, the quality penalty makes you reluctant to make use of these features. The timeshifting functions are also glitchy, and the 'Go to Live' button, which should return you to realtime viewing, provided sound, but no pictures.

Finally, in timeshift mode the entire picture was moved down the screen so you could only see the top half. These bugs should be dealt with before the product hits the shelves. However, nVidia and other TV card manufacturers need to address the quality issues if TV recording is going to be of any use.

DVD playback was smooth and glitch free, although the picture wasn't the best we've seen from hardware-supported software DVD players. Particularly in darker scenes, the image had a grainy appearance.

The remote is excellent, integrating very well with both the DVD and TV applications. It can launch either application, toggle full-screen viewing, control timeshifting and TV recording, and select menus, chapters, subtitle options as well as numerous other options in WinDVD. This product will be available later in the year from Creative, hopefully with some bug fixes.

Contact
nVidia: www.nvidia.com