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What's In The Box
What can you expect with this product? A CD with the software and drivers, a remote control with batteries, all the wires you'll need, user manual, a Visiontek GeForce2 MX400 video card, and the NVIDIA Personal Cinema break box.
A Closer Look
Lets take a closer look at what is really included. The video card is a GeForce2 MX400 with 64MB of memory. If you are interested in seeing how the card performed, we put it up against a bunch of other cards including the entire NVIDIA Ti lineup. You can view the benchmarks and test results here. Overall, it's a budget card offering mediocre performance. One of the benefits to the card is that it does offer dual VGA using NVIDIA's TwinView technology so you can do some dual monitor action. I found this feature to be very useful and is a definite plus.
Next up is the personal cinema break box. Let's take a look at what kind of inputs and outputs this offers:
- RF input
- Connection to computer (Control Bus)
- Line out
- S-Video out
- Composite out
- Line in
- S-Video in
- Composite in
Aside from this, there is a spot for an FM connection, which means that there should be an FM tuner option at one point in time.
As you can see in the picture below there is a green and red LED inside the box. The green just means the unit has power, and the red dot is for the infrared connection with the remote control.
One of the first things I noticed with the unit is that it doesn't have the full composite inputs, meaning the red/white/yellow plugs, but only the yellow (video-in). When you look in the box you will notice that there is a wire that has the red/white composite wires and on the other end is a 1/8" audio jack. Right away I noticed a problem, how was I supposed to capture video from something like Nintendo 64 or Dreamcast where all you can use is composite plugs? I'm pretty sure you can go to radio shack and get a plug that can turn the composite audio plugs into a 1/8" audio jack, but that would require you to pay more. I would have liked the actual break box to just have all the composite inputs. Not only that, but when I did connect the Nintendo 64 for example, the space around the composite video-in is not big enough, so the plug does not fit. There are things that should have definitely been taken into consideration. Of course there are always ways around it to make it work, but you shouldn't have to go those measures. Either way, most of you will not need to be recording video from your console, so everything else should have no problems at all.
Next up is the remote control. This pretty much allows you to control everything from the DVD player to the TV to the electronic programming guide. A very nice addition, and we found it very easy to use.
The documentation included is a very simple quick installation guide. It's not very much documentation considering there is a plethora of software included, but if you take a look on the CD you will notice that there are guides for everything on there. This is great considering Visiontek usually lacks manuals. Even though they are on the CD, it's much better than nothing.
What's On The CD?
As I mentioned in the previous section, there are the manuals for the software, but what kind of software can you expect to get? Visiontek went with Intervideo's WinDVD and WinDVR, as well as MGI VideoWave 4.
WinDVD is a full-featured DVD player, and is excellent quality. I had no problems at all with it, and is an excellent inclusion. WinDVR on the other hand allows TV-tuner functionality as well as recording and something called timeshifting. The TV-tuner capabilities of the software worked great, it scans all of your channels and tells you what you can receive. It also has a very cool feature where you can surf all the channels and see what's going on with every channel at one time by taking screenshots every few seconds on each station. Recording worked perfectly, but one of the cool things is that you have the capability of recording a certain program at a certain time which is very nice. Timeshifting didn't work exactly as expected, and was something that I was very upset by. What timeshifting does is basically record a certain amount of seconds in it's buffer and then play the TV with a delay. This allows you to actually pause live TV, rewind, and fast forward. You guys have all heard of the Tivo box for your TV right? This essentially does the same thing. So when I found out that this didn't work too great, I was very turned off. What happens is that the timeshifting delays and the audio gets delayed from the video, so you get that old Chinese movie in English affect. At least for me, that makes the whole feature useless. Hopefully this can be fixed in a future software upgrade of the WinDVR software.
MGI VideoWave 4 is included to allow you to do some basic video editing. This is actually a fairly powerful program and very easy to use. So if you have no experience in editing video, and want to port everything on to the computer, VideoWave 4 is great. It lets you cut your video, add effects and transitions, capture live video, and other cool stuff.
>> Installation
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