peripherals - InterVideo Home Theater

InterVideo announced its InterVideo Home Theater, a digital entertainment solution for watching and recording TV programs, viewing DVDs/VCDs, storing and playing personal music libraries and creating and viewing photo slideshows. According to the company, users can enjoy these capabilities on their living room PC or TV using a PC or notebook. And with the remote control, consumers should be able to control the system from their couches.

InterVideo Home Theater is designed to make it easy to find and schedule TV shows for viewing and recording because it carries out an automatic channel scan for antenna and cable-based TV receiver devices. When deciding which program to select, users can either channel surf or schedule upcoming broadcasts. Once recorded to the owner's PC hard drive, the videos can be sorted by date or name for navigation, and thumbnail images can be viewed to speed searches.

To ensure high-quality playback of recorded TV programs, as well as videos downloaded from the Internet, DVDs/VCDs and camcorder clips, Home Theater comes with InterVideo's WinDVD engine, a software solution for DVD playback on a PC. Consumers can also use Home Theater to capture screen snapshots of favorite video scenes and save them as digital pictures on their hard drives. The screen shots can then be viewed or printed using Home Theater's Picture application.

With the Music function, users can put all of their music files into a single library. The interface makes it simple to sort songs by title, artist, album or genre and create multiple personalized playlists of music compilations to suit every mood.

InterVideo Home Theater's Picture application lets users view thumbnail images of photos and sort them by date or name for navigation. Photos can be sent from the remote control device to the printer. Home Theater can also be used to automatically create slide shows with transition effects. Slide shows can be enhanced with background music by assigning a playlist music folder to run during the show. InterVideo Home Theater can be used with PC multi-channel sound cards for a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio experience or it can output a digital signal to multi-channel receivers in home theater systems.

By combining popular digital video and audio features into a single application, InterVideo Home Theater promises to be a replacement for DVD players and VCRs. Users can schedule TV recordings and send emails while watching TV, listening to music or surfing the Web.

Pricing, Availability
InterVideo Home Theater is available at InterVideo's web site with a limited introductory price of $99. The price includes a 36-key remote control and the USB dongle for the user's PC. InterVideo Home Theater is designed to be used with Windows 2000, and XP systems.

1/9/04 www.daytrum.com Editorial Staff