X-bit labs

Thermaltake Bach and Mozart HT PC Review (page 27)

Category: Multimedia

by Vasily Melnik

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

The Webcasting menu is interesting; it offers the following submenu:

Choose your favorite genre and examine the list of radio stations:

Select a station and enjoy the webcast.

Even though the bit-rate is low, you can hardly use this feature over a dial-up modem, while the remaining two features are for everyone to use.

The last menu item is rather informational than entertaining: News and Weather. If you choose News, then you will be asked to choose the news source…

…and the news section:

Lastly you select a news article proper:

The article is displayed as an ordinary web-page:

Controlling the mouse pointer from the remote control, you can easily click any hyperlink here.

When you select the Weather item, iMEDIAN will take a long pause:

And then will offer you to choose one city among the ones you have earlier specified in the settings.

The resulting picture will look as shown in the next figure:

It’s implemented well, but is this feature of any practical use? After all, the weather and news reports are just bonuses here that the multimedia shell acquired from the Digital Home concept.

That’s about all for today. We’ve given you a description of everything the iMEDIAN shell can currently do, except for the specifics of operation of its internal TV viewer. And in our view, this system is very, very close to perfect. It will suit well for building a PC-based multimedia center with excellent functionality. Thermaltake also separately sells a kit comprising the iMEDIAN software, a remote control, a 5.25” faceplate with an IR receiver and a VFD display, so such a system can be built on any PC, not necessarily in the Bach or Mozart system cases. And here’s a piece of advice to you: watch for updates on the manufacturer’s website because the previous version of the multimedia shell could do much fewer useful things!