Installation and Testing Continued -Options:

When you have the main viewing screen open you can right-click on it anywhere for the options menu to pop up, here you have quite a bit of setting you can play with to maximize your viewing experience including changing screen size, aspect ratios, adding picture-in-picture. One very cool feature is that you can set your wallpaper as the channel you are watching, sort of like Windows Vista Dreamscene but only better! An option that I found odd was the ability to make the TV window avoid the mouse cursor, in other words if your cursor comes to close to the open viewing window it will jump away from it, odd but I guess useful in some situations.

(Edit, from AutumnWave about the moving screen:

“It is useful for people that like to have the TV window
“on top” of all other windows, and still want to get some work done on
their screen.  For example, if they put the TV in bottom left corner of
their screen, but need to get to the Start menu, the TV window moves
out of the way when the mouse moves to the bottom left corner.”)

Clicking the ‘Options’ option or just clicking the setting button on the control panel will pop up yet more settings for you to adjust to your preferences. There are six tabs, but some of them have sub-tabs to themselves. The first tab is ‘TV Screen’ here you can change the basics of what you see, like the color of the OSD, Overscan settings and Closed Captioning.

The next tab is ‘Remote Control’, kind of obvious what this does, but here you can also program those Function keys on the remote as well.

The ‘Other’ tab is next, here are just settings that don’t fit anywhere else, like enabling the click sound, using mousewheel for volume and how to display the time.

In the ‘Driver’ tab there isn’t much there to change, and basically you shouldn’t have to change anything here.

The next tab is ‘Dec/Encoder’ or Decoder/Encoder which has two sub-tabs, Video and Audio. Here you can change how you want the sound and how the video is displayed.

The last tab is ‘Record/Timeshift’ which has three sub-tabs, Still Capture, Video Record and Timeshift. Here you can set where you want your still captures, recorded videos and timeshift to be stored on your computer, with various other options as well to adjust to your own preferences.

As you can see there are many options to change and set how you want, I only touched on a few of them but you can click the pictures to get a larger view to see everything you can do.

Installation and Testing Continued -Etc:

Ok, before we finish this up there’s a few other more little odds and ends that can be accessed as well.

Another thing I like about the OnAir GT is the ability to selectively scan channels as a TV would, you check the boxes you want and click ‘Start’ it then scans and saves all active channels for you, then of course you can go and manually decide which to keep.

The Scheduler or DVR function is fully featured with quite a few options you can choose from, channel, day of the week, the source to record from and other basic DVR options, an interesting choice under ‘Action’ is ‘Watch’ you can set it to come on so you can watch your show at the pre-selected time.

There’s a basic file list creator as well, similar to what you’d find in other media players.

Another little pop-up box from the main options menu and panel is ‘Color Adjustment’, you can easily adjust Brightness, Contrast and Colors with bar sliders.

When using the remote a small round icon appears on your screen with a green indicator on it that will change to red when you push a button to let you know it registered.

There is an included Editing program as I mentioned but I’m not sure if it’s the full version as a little window pops up and mentions a few things about 31days of use and limited storage, don’t know what that’s about exactly.

(Edit: AutumnWave informed that:  The editing program will check to see if you have an OnAir tuner
attached.  If so, it is unlimited in use.  (If no tuner is detected, it
works as a ‘trial’ program.))

I have Vista Ultimate 32bit also on this computer so of course I tested the OnAir GT with that as well and it worked just as it does on Windows XP with no problems, but as a bonus feature the On Air GT integrates with Windows Media Center to be able to watch TV through it and not the included software of the On Air GT. Media Center automatically recognized it as an external device/ TV Tuner and I was watching TV through the Media Center in minutes.

One thing that kind of bugs me about the OnAir GT is the remote, it only works with the OnAir GT so basically it adds yet another remote to your collection. If you have an HTPC setup with remote you’ll have two of them now, I have to wonder why the OnAir GT remote won’t work with other media players or even Windows Media Player or MCE, the buttons are there so why not make use of them and make life a little bit easier. Like now I have five remotes floating around, sure I guess I could get an all-in-one but they never seem to support all functions of devices I have and I like to have full control of things.

(Edit: Info from AutumnWave:

“you can control a lot
of other programs with the OnAir GT remote.  Remember the green
‘circle’ icon for the remote control? Right-click it and go to
‘Options’.  You can enable the sample keymaps and create your own.  One
of the presets is “Windows Media Player” and another is “Media
Center”.   Most (but not all) functions can be controlled by the
remote.  Any program that accepts ‘keyboard shortcuts’ can be used with
our remote control.  Simply edit/create a keymap and assign the
keyboard shortcut to a button.  The keymaps we included are samples.
Feel free to modify them to your own needs.”)

I guess I’m kind of lucky with all the channels that I received over the air, but I do live on a hill so I guess that helps reception a bit, of course depending on where you live and what’s available right now will determine what channels and how many you receive. Although, as the Digital TV deadline approaches next year more and more channels will become available to you and of course next year every channel will be digital so many more will be there for your viewing pleasures.

The only problem I had with the OnAir GT was the fact that I couldn’t get a live picture on a multi-monitor setup, it would only play HDTV and DTV on the main monitor, but the ATV or Standard would work on the others I have and I couldn’t find anything about in the help file, but a quick email to AutumWave and the problem was solved very quickly. Under the Decoder/Encoder tab for Video I had to change Video Mixing Render to ‘3D Surface’ and that fixed it for me so I could watch on any of my three monitors.