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Usage - Windows

The Intervideo Home Theater software as mentioned is pretty slick with the exception of the horrible country select menu. Again, it is graphics heavy in the style of Windows XP Media Center Edition. Menus are intuitive and scheduling shows to record are equally as simple and did not require a lot of digging around as with the Leadtek GUI.

The different mode buttons on the XC Cube Remote bring up the appropriate portion of the Home Theater application. Firing it up the manual Windows way brings the viewer to the main menu which consists of seven menu choices, DVD/VCD, TV, Radio, Pictures, Video Clips, Music, and Setup.

In the TV Menu, there are six side bar options, Guide, Recorded TV, Schedule, Closed Caption, Channel Surfing and Settings. Guide brings up the TitanTV website, a free cable listing service. Schedule is brings up the classical VCR type scheduler where time, date, channel are specified.

Closed Captioning brings on the text at the bottom of the screen. Channel Surfing is pretty cool: it divides the television area into 16 windows and displays a screen cap of what is on each channel and is continually updated. Settings is a little extraneous; it allows the setting of the TV source, Input Source and recording quality. I think this could have been put under setup in the main menu instead.

On the bottom there are multimedia and navigation buttons - including channel buttons, volume, record, screen capturing, and record. The play button allows for timeshifting of the current show. Time shifting means that in a hypothetical situation where lunch is not sitting well and it happens that the 2004 MotoGP Championship is on the line in the final lap of the season but lunch just is not going to cooperate for the final lap, pause can be hit. When lunch settles down and the play button is hit, the show continues on magically as if the world froze just for the guy who hit pause. This is fundamentally different from record as the television show is buffered instead of being recorded as a seperate clip while current playback continues on.

The only really bothersome feature is the fact that all the navigation and menu elements populate the screen unless it is in full screen mode. Just a straight window of the video display is not possible as far as I can tell.