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Thursday, May 25, 2006

ATI Multimedia Center Tidbit

(How to disable the TV-On-Demand)

I glossed over some of the TV controls in my previous ATI MMC review.

This is the TV player (again).

Here is a close-up image of the relevant controls (the ones I forgot to mention in the last post):









The unicycle: toggles TV-on-Demand ON/Off. TV-on-Demand is a feature that I haven't found much use for myself, although it sounds cool in principle. You can toggle TV-On-Demand ON/OFF by clicking on the little symbol that looks like a unicycle. I have no idea why the symbol for TV-on-Demand is a unicycle -- it must have made sense to someone, but not me. When TV-on-Demand is active, the unicycle changes to what is either a small TV icon, or a briefcase. Again, I don't know why they chose these symbols. Fortunately, hovering over them with the mouse brings up text descriptions.

The football (American-style) or eye-shaped icon: is actually pretty cool -- it's a channel surfing device. It displays mini pictures (sort of like "picture-in-picture") of 9 channels. I'm guessing about the 9 channels-- I only get 6, but it looks like 9 could fit in there. Don't expect to be able to watch all 9 channels at once -- they are displayed at one frame per few seconds. It's like stop animation.

The more obvious controls:

Up/down arrows: change the channel/station.

The pause button ("): pauses -- or resumes -- the TV, really only useful if TV-on-Demand is activated.

The smaller curved arrow: is the channel callback button, which changes the channel to the last station you were on.

That scathing review about the remote "wonder" is coming... I promise!

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