Power Cinema's Hybrid Tuners with Warthog

CATCHING UP to the current week or so of press releases, we get to the new version of PowerCinema by Cyberlink. This one is, an addon to the standard PowerCinema we told you about a while back, but with one major addition. The new feature is what is known as Hybrid Tuners, basically it will support a digital tuner and an analog one at the same time. Obvious as this may sound, they say it is the first piece of software to do both. Want to record the football game that is broadcast in analog while recording a movie off digital cable? The new PowerCinema is the software for you.

Next comes the coolest game release of the year, Richard Burns Rally on Gizmondo. This stunning driving game is by Warthog, previously released on PC, XBox and PS2. Now, I have never seen or played this game, but I do like driving games, and I do like saying Warthog. Warthog Warthog Warthog. I don't have a Gizmondo either, but I will still say Warthog.

Going back to where we started, we come to Cyberlink again with their DVD Gold Burner and Platinum Creator suites. Gold is a 7-in-1 suite with PowerStarter 3, PowerDVD 5 Basic, PowerProducer 2 Gold, Power2Go 3, PowerBackup, MediaShow 3, PhotoNow and MusicMatch. The Platium version adds PowerDVD Copy and PowerDirector 3 Express. Gold is more oriented at copying and low end creating of DVDs while the Platinum suite is for more complex creations. You can read about it all here, and you will probably be seeing a lot of the parts bundled with cards and drives in the not so distant future.

Moving along, we come to the Elitegroup's newest SFF computer, and this one has two big twists. The first is the most obvious, the front panel media features, take a look at this.

You may notice the large amount of knobs and buttons on this computer. These are to control the nifty multimedia features of the EZ-Buddie 2 without booting into Windows. You can play the radio, DVDs and view pictures either in or out of windows. The LEDs on the front of the computer allow you to control things when the machine is not fully up, but they also work when it is on. In windows, they can act as readouts for many system functions, and that is neat.

The other thing is something I was told at Computex. If I remember right, I saw either this EZ-Buddie 2 or something very similar, and it looked very ungainly. The size was not a regular shuttle-esque case, and it was odd. Talking to the people at the booth, they told me what I was seeing, it was the same size more or less, it was just turned around. Give it a twist so you are looking at it from a different angle, and it looks just like the same old same old. Then again, I could be thinking of something else, and the shape is just different. Either way, it is seems to have some very cool touches. Warthog. µ