ShowShifter Digital Media Gateway How Does ShowShifter Stack Up With The Rest? Douglas Smith
ShowShifter does a really good job when it comes to viewing DVD, Television, and playing Music, and we were quite impressed with the viewing window and the smooth-looking skin that came with the program. When compared to other programs we've seen lately, ShowShifter is right up there with the best of them. We recently did a review of another product called SnapStream PVS, quite similar to ShowShifter--with slight differences which we really would like to see in this product as well. One such was the ability to view your recordings over a home network, which we felt was a great idea, especially since a lot of households these days have multiple PCs. Home Media Networks did tell us that this feature will be forthcoming. Also, the timed recording feature in the PVS section of the program is still a bit raw, especially setting the minutes after the hour for a recording. To do a recording that wasn't right on the hour, such as at 9:05, we had to click on little up and down arrows for the minutes-- really frustrating, especially when the minutes are at 35 and you want 00.
One area where we thought ShowShifter really shone was in the viewing portion of the program, specifically the Television, DVD, and PVS(Personal Video Station) reproduction, which was excellent. ShowShifter tends to load very slowly right now, but is still in beta and should improve in the release version. Also, the recordings made using the PVS at the medium settings tended to be pretty large. A 30 minute recording was about 400 MB, but at Low those same recordings used about 130 MB. Recording size was a little better controlled with SnapStream for the same recording times.
One other big problem we had with ShowShifter was the ability to select our viewing directory/folder. The program defaults to a Shows directory on the default drive, and to change requires editing the registry, a rather uncomfortable operation, to say the least. Most users just don't want to tamper with the registry, especially when their computers are running fine. Home Media Networks did mention in the readme file that it would be correcting this by the release version--PLEASE DO! However, when it comes to managing a DVD, and Multimedia recordings (something other products in its class just don't address quite yet), ShowShifter really shines--the television viewing is very good.
The one other thing that we would like to see is a more obvious and defined way of resizing the viewing area so that while doing something else, like viewing mail, etc., one can still view the TV and move it around on the desktop. We could not find this feature and were told by Home Media Networks that all you have to do is double click near the top of the screen and it becomes a window that can be resized and repositioned.
ShowShifter does have something that the others don't, and that is the ability to Pause live TV: we found this feature extremely helpful. Just click Pause while viewing a show and ShowShifter starts recording from that point. To continue watching, simply press Play and you are right back where you left off. This is great for football games during the holiday season when you have to stop and go shopping for beer or something like that! So much is packed into ShowShifter that it is a must-try-for-yourself package. With all of the great current features and things to come post-beta, ShowShifter could soon be the one to watch. We will just have to wait and see if it can surpass similiar programs such as SnapStream PVS in terms of internet and network capability. For now it is running a very close second and gaining.
