Well, we’re not going to describe how to use CyberLink PowerCinema here, as it’s a fairly standard app and it looks similar to Windows Media Center Edition. It’s not the full on version, as if you want to watch DVD’s, then you have to upgrade.
The supplied version only allows for TV, Radio and recorded video content to be watched but that is fine for what the U8000 was designed for. This is quite understandable, as there are licence fees to be paid for the extra features.
In general PowerCinema is a pretty straight forward to use package, although we’re not sure if it was because of the tuner or the software, but changing channels felt really slow, especially on DVB-T.
Tuning is done automatically, but we had major problems getting digital reception in the area were we where at the time of testing, although placing the antenna horizontally seemed to fix the problem oddly enough. Your mileage will vary but of course you would want to make sure you are using this device in an area with good TV reception or you may not have much luck.
As you can see from the screenshots, digital reception was excellent and the U8000 also supports EPG or Electronic Program Guides. You can select to record programs from the EPG and the U8000 also allows for time shift recording.
Analogue picture quality from a cable TV signal was sufficiently good, although we don’t have any screen shots from it here. It wasn’t as good as the digital channels, but all of the cable TV channels got tuned in and there’s an option to sort them automatically in PowerCinema.
Apart from the channel selection slowdown issues, the U8000 did a pretty good job and both picture and audio quality was among the best we’ve seen from USB DVB-T tuners so far.
