TerraTec Cinergy 2400i DT dual-tuner card

The remote control uses infra red and comes with a USB receiver, although I'd rather have seen a radio-frequency remote bundled, like the ones ATI supply with its All-in-Wonder cards. The colour scheme is rather strange as well, with a grey casing and orange buttons. Some of the buttons aren't self explanatory and some have dual functionality. Hmmm, confusing. The rather small buttons can also be awkward to press and I would've particularly liked larger buttons for the channel and volume controls. The playback controls could also be improved, as the play button has, for some reason, been separated from the fast-forward, rewind and pause controls.

The software package is Cyberlink PowerCinema 4.5, which closely resembles Windows MCE. You can use it for watching TV, DVDs, video clips and photo slideshows, and for making and playing time-shift recordings. It handles music playback too. You can also use it for listening to the radio - though not with the Cinergy 2400i DT card, as it doesn't have a built-in radio tuner. However, you can listen to the 24 radio channels that are inlcuded in the Freeview package just as you can on any DVB-T set-top box.

PowerCinema 4.5's user interface is easy to navigate with the remote, or using a mouse, but it's not entirely logical. Tuning to the TV channels is straightforward enough (and takes just 10-15 minutes during set-up), but once you start using the remote control in conjunction with PowerCinema 4.5, you realise that emulating Windows MCE might not have been such a great idea. The reason behind this is the remote control, which seems to make simple tasks complicated.

Here's an example. To get into the main TV viewing part of PowerCinema 4.5 you select the 'TV' option and up pops the TV window. This has a menu to the left and a menu bar at the bottom of the screen with various playback volume and general settings to choose from. There's a button on the remote that brings PowerCinema 4.5 from window mode to full screen, but this doesn't make the TV picture full screen. To do this you have to move to the TV window with the arrow keys on the remote control and then press the 'ok' button. Not exactly straightforward.

To enable picture-in-picture or picture-by-picture when the main TV window isn't full screen, you have to select the Twin TV option in the menu and then select the second tuner of the card. Once again, this seems like a rather convoluted way of doing things. Recorded video quality was excellent and you can also take screen grabs from whatever is showing in the main TV window. You can even convert teletext screen grabs into text.