S3 OmniChrome TV/Graphics Card


TV Tuner Software and Remote Control

 

TV Tuner Software and IR Remote Control
Bringing it all Together

The OmniChrome's affordable price and feature set make it an attractive solution for a Home Theater PCI.  With the included InterVideo Home Theater and IR Remote Control, the OmniChrome appears to fit the bill nicely, with a clean, easy to understand onscreen interface.

  

  

InterVideo's Home Theater offers a clean interface for running a PC's multimedia functions on a TV screen.  The software integrates perfectly with the OmniChrome, offering analog TV control, DVD and VCD playback, Picture browsing as well as media cataloguing and music playback.  The menus were very easy to use, with the Home Theater Remote Control having a comfortable, natural feel as compared to other offerings from ATI and NVIDIA.

    

Home Theater PC also allows for a fair amount of configuring, including input sources, video recording quality and antenna type.  The Picture menu and DVD settings allow for the fine tuning of how the menus and outputs functioned. Overall, we really liked the simplicity and ease of use of Home Theater PC and found it much simpler to follow than ATI's Multimedia Center.  However, when it comes to all around features, the Multimedia Center has a more robust feature set.  While previewing the TV tuner functions, we found the image quality to be on par with what we would expect from a PC TV tuner card.


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