Cyberlink dwells in couch potato paradise

CYBERLINK'S PowerCinema 4 software brings to your PC the personal video recorder functions popularized by products like TiVO. Used together with a TV tuner card, these include the ability to pause and rewind live TV and to schedule recordings with an easy to understand, onscreen list of programs. Since the software can call on all the resources of the PC, it can also play DVDs, CDs, radio, and music files - and do a lot more, too.

Cyberlink makes much of the software's '10 foot interface'. This is consumer electronics parlance for the ability to control the device from ten feet away, with a remote control. If you like, you could call this the 5 foot interface or the 5 meter interface - the important point is that the user doesn't need to touch the PC, keyboard or mouse, but can instead recline comfortably on the sofa, waving the remote in the general direction of the screen.

The review package I received from Cyberlink included the software, a Palit Microsystems FunTV TV/radio tuner card, a remote control and USB infra red receiver, and a DVD burning plug-in. Cyberlink plan to sell a retail version of PowerCinema 4, which will be very similar to this package. However, many of the software's users won't be buying it directly. They'll be buying TV tuner cards which include PowerCinema 4 as part of a bundle. So the features, and the extras included, could be different.

The version of the product I tested was a beta, not the finished article. Despite this PowerCinema 4 is already an extremely polished product. The user interface looks very impressive, with clear, easy to read graphics, and neat (but unobtrusive) animation effects. If you've used Windows Media Center Edition, you'll find the interface remarkably familiar. And, for the most part, the '10 foot interface' works perfectly: you never have to touch the PC, keyboard or mouse, except when inserting CDs or DVDs.

There are a few functions missing that should be in the finished product, such as the ability to name radio stations. There were also a couple of features that I wasn't able to test fully. These include the electronic program guide, which downloads program schedules from the Internet or from Teletext. Support for this is country-specific, and I couldn't get it to work in Taiwan.

I was very satisfied with most of the key home media center functions. Playing DVDs, watching TV, pausing or rewinding live TV, listening to the radio, playing and ripping audio CDs, photo slide show, and so on - these all worked very smoothly. In this review, I won't go into great detail about most of these functions, because they just worked as they should. You will be able to find full specifications, and a complete list of features, on Cyberlink's website when PowerCinema 4 is formally released during the next couple of months. Instead, I want to focus on the small number of areas where PowerCinema 4 didn't work as I expected.

Most notable was the inability to properly fast forward and rewind some video file formats, such as Divx. Fast forwarding of these video formats is limited to a double speed play mode, and a few can't be fast forwarded or rewound at all. In addition, there is no way to jump to a particular point in a video file without fast forwarding all the way through (and that's obviously very tedious at 2X speed).

PowerCinema actually uses Windows' built-in media playing functions to play most video formats. So these navigational problems are inherited, say CyberLink. However, I strongly believe CyberLink should at least add the ability to jump instantly to arbitrary points in video files, much as you can by using the seek bar in Windows Media Player and other similar products.

I should empasize that all the standard DVD features are included, including multi-speed fast forwarding (with the audio remaining at the correct pitch) and rewind. If you're in a hurry, you'll find a surprising proportion of movies are still perfectly understandable played at 1.5 or even 2 times the original speed. Well, maybe that's not such a healthy idea, actually.

Another feature that I think Cyberlink should consider adding is the ability to continue playing a CD while it is being copied to the hard drive. This is one of the basic tenets of the PC as home entertainment center: don't stop the music. And in most cases, CyberLink has got this one right. You can, for example, switch back to the Windows desktop and continue listening to music while you do Windows stuff. You can also shrink the PowerCinema window (all text and graphics shrink to fit), so you can watch video or TV in a window while you surf the web or whatever.

On the remote, the positioning of the 'back' button was rather awkward - it's a frequently-used navigation button and should be within a thumb's length of the rest of the other navigation buttons. Instead you have to shift your grip on the controller to reach it. It might also be useful to have a button emulating the windows escape key, so you could get rid of any unwanted dialog boxes that other programs pop up while you're using PowerCinema. However, it seems that most (or perhaps all) of the time, hitting the remote's 'home' button will put PowerCinema back on top of any unwanted interruptions.

I felt that switching between channels was a little sluggish: it takes around one second. That can be annoying if you don't have a good memory for channel numbers, and need to scan through the channels one at a time. It also makes the software's 'TV Preview' feature (which automatically scans through and shows thumbnails of all channels) too slow to be useful. This is possibly a problem with the tuner card, not the software (though TV Preview should really be caching the thumbnails, not waiting to reload them every time). Finally, I should note that although you can schedule recording of radio shows, you can't pause or rewind live radio - this isn't a feature that Cyberlink plans to add to the final version of PowerCinema 4.

It's great to have a simple interface, but it would be nice to have some extra features under the hood for power users,. How about the ability to add your own ad hoc soundtracks to videos, by keeping an audio track or cd playing while watching a video with its soundtrack off? Or to save the software's 'cache' of realtime TV (which lets you rewind or pause live TV), so you could keep a copy without having to hit the record button first.

Cyberlink's remote control interface emulates keyboard key presses on a USB keyboard, and so continues to work outside PowerCinema. For example, if you hit the on/off button at the top of the remote, the standard windows shutdown dialog appears. Instead of grabbing the keyboard or mouse, you can then use the arrow buttons on the remote to select standby, turn off, or restart. All this without leaving the safety of the sofa.

The one thing the remote control definitely won't help with is the very first step: turning the PC on. this is one of the few places where the ten foot interface breaks down. In theory this should work, since the remote emulates a keyboard, and you should be able to use the keyboard to wake the PC from suspend mode. I did try fiddling with the BIOS keyboard power on settings and the USB power jumpers on the mainboard, but to no avail. Actually, I've never seen the S3 keyboard power-on feature working reliably on any mainboard, so I can't blame Cyberlink for this.

I tested PowerCinema on a Biostar iDEQ 300G small form factor PC. These two products work very well together, since the iDEQ 300G is intended to be used as a home media center, and includes a remote control and built-in infra red sensor which are compatible with PowerCinema. The test system had a 3.4 Ghz P4 CPU, 512 MB of memory, and, for most of the testing, I used the on-board 915G chipset for the display.

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