X-bit labs

Thermaltake Bach and Mozart HT PC Review (page 26)

Category: Multimedia

by Vasily Melnik

[ 01/28/2006 | 06:17 PM ]

You can choose either Music Movie or Photo. The single exception is the Media Explorer submenu where there are two more sub-items: DVD File (vob) and HDTV file (ts, tp). Links to all the media files indexed in the program’s database are stored under My Media. If you select My Video, for example, you will see something like that:

These are the folders with video files that you’ve have specified in the Media Scan menu. Choose any of them:

And next choose the necessary file. The currently selected file is marked with blue; the last launched file from this folder is marked with red.

Launching a file is as easy as pressing the Play button on the remote control:

The player settings are quite extensive.

There’s a series of tab at the bottom of the window that contain the player settings:

• Play (player controls): play/pause, fast forward and backward, select next file, disc eject;
• Detail (on-the-fly picture adjustment): brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, aspect ratio, setting a bookmark and setting a video frame as the file icon;
• Subtitle: size, position, margin, shadow, bold, outline and sync parameters. These settings are only available if you use the internal subtitle renderer. If an external filter is in use, they become inactive;
• Go: quickly select another type of media files (TV, music, photo).

By the way, if you return to file selection during playback, the current file will be still reproduced in a small window in the bottom left corner.

The same player processes audio files:

The last menu item, Media Explorer, looks like the Windows Explorer:

But it shows multimedia files only.

The last added files are displayed in the New Media section, so if you have no desire to search for the latest downloaded/recorded files, just let iMEDIAN do it.

These are the basic settings and capabilities of the system which will certainly be employed by the user. The rest of the shell’s functions are about various network services. We’ll give you a brief overview of them.

“Network Media” is almost identical to “Local Media” in functionality, except that it is a source of files. It is strange that you have to visit the developer’s website and download the iCASTER software to use this feature.

Why couldn’t they include it into the software pack from the beginning, we wonder?

In the CD/DVD Removable section you can manually start a disc (the purpose of this item isn’t quite clear as a dialog asking if you want the disc to be played pops up as soon as you insert one into the drive).

We won’t describe the TV menu since the user is unlikely to use the internal iMEDIAN viewer and the viewer has few settings actually: viewing and recording TV programs and a schedule.

A fastidious user may find these settings insufficient.