Intervideo's Home Theater 2
S3 have chosen Intervideo's Home Theater 2 software as the main point of user interaction with the OmniChrome's features. It features a 10-foot GUI (a GUI designed to be easy to read use on a display from 10 feet away, so think TV and you sitting on your sofa) and the OmniChrome remote makes it easy to use, supporting all of HT2's features. Installing HT2 and the remote control software has it sit in the system tray until you press one of the function buttons on the remote that coincide with a feature in HT2. Upon first launch you're asked to set it up, tune all available TV channels and, if you live in America, setup the browser-based TV guide.Then you simply navigate through the features using the remote, browsing your videos, watching DVDs or TV, looking at pictures or playing music, all of which HT2 is capable of. Here are a multitude of shots of the GUI in action, so you can see how it looks.
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Usage and Issues
Usage is actually really great with Home Theater 2. Using the remote, I was able to setup the software in its entirety without touching a keyboard or a mouse, just how it should be. Changing channels is quick, TV quality is great (signal willing) and everything seems pretty damn good until you realise that TV audio is only mono.That brings me on to the biggest failing that The Tech Report had recently with OmniChrome. Not a single broadcast TV signal that the OmniChrome and its tuners (there's a different tuner for each major market) can handle can be accompanied even by simple stereo audio, never mind some of the broadcast Dolby positional audio formats that have been in use in broadcast TV in many countries for years. If your audio card has even simple 2.1 output, all audio channels on a TV broadcast you're tuning will share the same audio signal and there's no left-right split (never mind front-rear or side-side).
That's unbelievably poor for a consumer television product for the PC, released in 2004. The major rub is that it's not a driver issue, rather a fixed hardware problem that will only be rectified in the next generation of OmniChrome products. I have to agree with Geoff's assessment that it makes it impossible to recommend the OmniChrome as a TV tuning product, such a major facet of its operation, in any respect whatsoever. That's regardless of any 3D performance and even taking into account that for the price point, it's the only product that'll do HDTV input and output using RGB component connection.
I'm pretty shocked to find S3 let OmniChrome out of the door in such a basic, crippled fashion.
Besides that, the TV guide application isn't integrated into HT2 and neither is there any version for viewers outside of North America, that I can see. Such basic functionality is pervasive. While UK readers get a raw deal in many other applications (the major TV guide sites like to lock out XML guide info streaming to the major TV controller packages like BeyondTV), at least there's scope for trying to get a TV guide working outside of North America using different software, on other TV tuner products. OmniChrome (who's tuners are supported by other tuning applications) needs different software for those customers.
Time-shifting TV works fine given ample disk space and HT2 seems to make use of the Techwell's synchronisation engine to make sure audio and TV match up when you unpause, rewind or fast-forward through your captured TV. So there's promise with OmniChrome, but with such basic functionality completely broken in the hardware, it's promise that you really have give a miss this time around.
