|
After you've climbed the mountain that is the All-In-Wonder hardware and cable package, and you have your TV antenna hooked up, your VIVO cables plugged in and the audio connecters all sorted, you'll need to install the software.
Being a review kit, the package helpfully didn't arrive with any. A good start. Especially since I'm on a modem and the downloads are nothing short of hefty. But, it lets me talk about the software a bit more and tell you something other than "you put the CD in and click Next a bunch of times and hey presto, it works". Usually that's what will happen, but incase you don't hit software nirvana with your All-In-Wonder, here's what you do.
Firstly, get a recent set of CATALYST's installed (I used 3.6's), along with the partnered Control Panel. Reboot between each, remember to remove old drivers first. Driver Cleaner is good for that. That lets you get a nice resolution for setting the rest up, and you get to check SmartGART to see that everything is going OK hardware wise. You'll notice it installs all the drivers for the capture hardware and the Rage Theater 200 too. Then download and install DirectX 9.0 and Windows Media Encoder 9. A 9.5MB download for WME9, it installs the technology needed to get MMC working capture wise, both from the VIVO box and the TV tuner. Reboot when they are done installing.
Then you get down to the nitty gritty of installing the ATI specific software for the All-In-Wonder. Next up is Multimedia Centre 8.5, the guts of the operation. As mentioned before, it contains all the applets needed for working with the hardware, TV tuner, media player, DVD player etc.
This page is the hub for setting up an All-In-Wonder manually in Windows XP, so use it to grab the DVD decoder (be warned, it requires an older MMC install CD to validate you have ATI hardware) and the MMC8.5 install files. Install the DVD decoder first, reboot, then install MMC8.5.
When that's done, you are nearly home and dry. All that's left is RemoteWonder software. Get that here. Having installed MMC8.5, I used version 1.5 of the RemoteWonder software.
That's it. Nothing too bad, but it all needs to be done in a certain order, and it's time consuming too. When it's all done, the last reboot will leave you with ATI's Multimedia Center launch bar stuck to the right hand side of your primary desktop and the following in Device Manager.
Note the RemoteWonder under USB devices and the Rage Theater driver devices under Sound and Video. That's just installing everything done, now you have to set it up.
|
