Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Showshifter
Iain Laskey finds a solution to those ATI All In Wonder Radeon blues.
| Product | Showshifter |
|---|---|
| Company | Showshifter |
| Web | www.showshifter.com |
| Price | $29.95 |
| We like | |
| We don't like | |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
I recently looked at the ATI All in Wonder Radeon and had more than a few problems with it. The drivers and supplied software seemed to have far too many bugs and instabilities and it took far too long to get a half working semi-stable system. When I made a few enquiries on the net to try to fix these problems, the same reply kept cropping up over and over "Get ShowShifter".
Installation
ShowShifter despite its $US price tag hails from Scotland and can best be described as Personal Video Recorder (PVR) software. This means it allows you to use your ATI, Hauppauge or Matrox TV cards to watch and record TV on your PC. It does rather more than that though.
ShowShifter can be downloaded from the website and tried out first before you cough up the entirely reasonable £20-ish pounds for the registered version which brings you some very useful extras such as different file formats and the ability to recompress recordings. Take note of the system requirements first though, particularly the driver versions as these can be critical to the reliability of the program.
Once installed, some basic configuration and setting up is needed to tell it what hardware you wish to use to capture the video and sound. If you haven't already tuned in different stations on the TV card, you can do that too.
One of the strengths of ShowShifter is its integration with DigiGuide, the UK based TV listings provider on the web. If you wish to use this feature, you must install DigiGuide first to ensure ShowShifter installs the correct modules.
The first thing that jumps out with ShowShifter is the rather chunky look. This initially looks a tad odd, even ugly but it has been designed to be viewed on a TV screen across the room, not on a PC screen so the big friendly buttons and large text are in fact a boon. ShowShifter can work windowed or switched via a mouse click to full screen or TV only full screen.
Features
The basic functions are TV, PVR, DVD and Music. In TV mode you can pause real-time TV should you need to answer the phone then return to your program without missing anything. ShowShifter will automatically record ahead to allow you to see the rest of the program. If you have one of the supported Infrared modules for your PC (details on their web site) then you can train the software to respond to the remote allowing you to easily change channel, volume levels and so on without going near your PCs keyboard or mouse.
The more important part of the program is the PVR section which allows you to record one or more TV programs on different channels for later viewing. This can take a fair amount of hard disk space so consider buying a big hard disk if you intend stacking a lot of recordings up. Each recording can be set for a given time and date along with a repeat option and quality setting. Important recordings can be set for high quality whereas perhaps the evening news can be recorded at a lower setting. As well as the supplied codecs, you can use the latest DivX codecs to get good recordings with excellent compression. The PVR module can be programmed to record directly from DigiGuide making the whole process very slick indeed.
The next main function is the DVD player which gives you all the expected features including multi-angle selection and menu navigation. As the test PC doesn't have a DVD drive I wasn't able to test this feature properly.
The final function is a music player which allows you to access and play any Windows Media compatible files such as MP3, WMA or RealAudio. You can pick individual tracks via mouse or remote or select the shuffle option.
Support
The ShowShifter website has an excellent support area with FAQs, hardware specific help, bulletin board and email contact. The bulletin board is particularly good with regular input from the developers responding to users queries and problems as well as a useful beta feedback area. The developers make regular beta versions of ShowShifter available to test new facilities. The current beta has some excellent new abilities over the existing release version which are well worth trying out. Furthermore, development is active and suggestions from existing users are taken seriously.
Conclusion
Whilst ShowShifter is clearly a cracking piece of software especially for the price, I must return to my original reason for looking at it. Does it help with the various problems that ATI Radeon All-in-One users can have? Yes. Whilst there were still some minor issues, ShowShifter did manage to record the right thing from the right channel and with the right sound, something I had never managed using ATI's MMC software. The fact that it works closely with DigiGuide and has growing 3rd party support is merely the icing on the cake. A fine program and from the UK too!
