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#1
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Catalyst Media Center, worst app ever?
Ever have a dream where things are so unbeleivable, your mind goes
"Wait, this must be a dream, reality could never be this bizarre? IMHO, so it is with Catalyst Media Center. I've seen dozens of bad, bad, crappy apps, but I think this takes the cake. Some, just a small fraction, of its gotchas: (1) The installer, well, sometimes it installs some things. More often, it just flashes up full screen windows full of the ATI logo and some purple cool-aid splashes. Does it bother checking for oh, say, conflicting video or audio or drivers? Not really. It can detect an installation of it's real origin app, and uninstall some parts of IT. The "custom" install options have ludicrous choices, like the option to not install the parental control stuff, which, hold your sides, they claim takes 15 MB! ANy useful install options, like choosing a directory, well that's just not available, or hidden so well I can't find it. (2) Now you'd think, if an app that should be really fast, in order to juggle all that data in real time, you'd think they'd write it in real native code. Well, you'd be wrong. Instead it seems to be a lethargic .NET app, you know, the kind Microsoft themselves tried to do for Vista, but then even they chucked two years worth of work and went back to native code. So we have an app where key presses and mouse clicks, even on a 3200MHz PC, take, oh, one, two, three, or twenty seconds to register. Sweet. Oh, but back to the installer-- you'd think, if an app required .NET version x.y, an installer program would take the trouble to like maybe try checking for the existence of .NET, or to be really whizzy, the correct version thereof. You'd think, and I thought, but apparently the pinheads at ATI, no such thought crossed their mind. Well, that's not actually correct, it looks like they WENT OUT OF THEIR WAY to ignore anything along these lines. Because if you do a clean install of Windows (more later), the CMC installer silently skips the CMC installation, as there's no .NET framework around. Silently, like with not even a casual mention of, "Oh BTW, I'm not going to install CMC, as there's no .NET here". Sweet. (3) And even if you do somehow get CMC installed, they you get the joys of running it. Things like: (a) Splash screens. Russet-haired babes rotating, (not anti-aliased or synced to the frame rate BTW), in provocative poses. ATI: If I want splash screens, I think I can find them. If I want to stare at hot Russet-haired babes in black leather cooter-high boots, I suspect there is a site somewhere on the Internet devoted to just that kink. I was kinda hoping for something like, video software. Of the setup screens, you wouldnt beleive our rants, so let's just say the setup screens are non-intuitive, non-grammatical, overly-nested, unhelpful, undocumented, slow, VERY BUGGY, and frustrating to boot. Something as simple as setting up the channels you want is almost impossible. First, you can't just type in "Channel 4-WCCO", et al. You have to let the software go through a slow, out of sync, channel scan (which on one button is labeled "SCAN CHANNELS", and on the next similar but not quite page "FIND STATIONS". What should take seconds takes many minutes, and even when it's done, you're likely to have a garbled list of channels it "found", most are likely to be mislabled, i.e. PBS Kids video is likely to show up under "Station 7", whatever that means, meanwhile there are from five to SEVENTY identical copies of "WFTW-67" the software entered into the channel list. Which is nearly impossible to edit, thanks to all the slow wide glare-spangled buttons which rarely do anything useful or correct. There *is* an option which warms your heart the first time you see it-- an option to download a "TV Guide". For free! Wow, now that's a nice feature. Or it would be, if it functioned at all. Sometimes it presents you with the wide purple flashy button labeled "titan". That's all. Yo're somehow supposed, by osmosis I guess, to know what that is. But never mind, it doesnt matter a whit whether you know what titan is or not. Because when you press the button, yet another slow progress bar appears, widens up to 40%, and then hangs. No TV guide appears, no error messages, no suggestions as to what to do to ameliorate, improve, sidestep, bypass, jump over, or fix whatever problem is indicated by this particular hang. (c) Now maybe by this point you think, well, this guy didnt bother reading the manual, or the on-line help, or the link to the helpful FAQ site. Well, usually you'd be right. And this time you're right too. Because I didnt go to any of those places BECAUSE THEY ARE EITHER BLANK OR DON'T EXIST. Yep, a 21st century app with no visible help. Well, that's not quite true. If you wander thru the purple button majesty, you eventually stumble on a page with buttons labeled "HELP", "WHAT's NEW", "NOTICES", and your heart warms. But the quickly cools when yu find out that no matter how many of these buttons you press, no matter how hard, all you get are empty pages. White screens. (d) Now on the UP side, after you try reinstalling CMC, and then reinstall Windows when CMC messes up everything in the video and audio driver and codec chains, then repeat installing .NET 2.0, and you wait for CMC to find a few channels, and duplicates in spades, you migth EVENTUALLY be greeted with some actual real-time video from the TV tuner. But just a few caveats: (A) The video appears in something like FOUR preset sizes-- too small (preview size), about the size of a Zoraastrian 4 Shekel stamp. Kinda almost good (37/49ths of the screen, or if you accidentally (accidentally as there's no mention of this feature), if you click on the 33/46th screen size image, it flips into full-screen mode. Can you choose size, position, resolution? Not as far as I can see. (B) the 37/48th screen image is surrounded by WHITER THAN WHITE. Whiter than Oxydol white. If you turn down the brightness with you' monitor's controls, the video image is mighty dim. No problem you think, EVERY TV made since 1939 has had brightness and contrast controls. Every video card, even a few ATI cards, come with software brightness and contrast sliders. So obviously CMC has BRIGHTNESS and CONTRAST virtual knobs, twirlers, sliders, or scroll boxes, wheels, or skis? Nope. Not as far as I can see. (C) So you learn to put up with watching the infomercial channel, dimly, with CMC's text boxes advertising this as the PBS kids channel 2. After a while, the thrill of watching murky Popeil Food dehydrator commercials wears a bit thin. So you consider changing the channel. No problem you think as you reach for the TV. Every TV made since 1939 has channel switching knobs NO? And there's even less possibility that CMC is lacking a channel switching knob, as of course knobs on a screen do not cost anything for the bakelite and brass setscrew, the knob is VIRTUAL, just a screen image. Hmm, no knob visible. There are a fewe large purple menus on the left, but the one labled in Japengrish as "CHAN MOVE" or somesuch, is useless, as it brings up all 79 mistakenly logged copies of the infomercial channel, and either scrolls through them too slowly, or too quickly, with a gratuitous "bounce" as if the channel numbers are ona one-armed bandit. Come to think of it, this does have a lot in common with gambling. It turns out there are at least two other and undocumented ways to change channels. I fyou hover the cursor in the lower left of the screen, a bunch of tiny inscrutable purple circles appear, some of them with cockroaches, civil-defense symbols, and less identifiable hieroglyphs on them. Turns out the seventh from the left iis the channel up button. Which works, slowly, oh so slowly, like one channel every five seconds on a 3300+ PC, and even then the channel text is twelve seconds behind the video, which is three seconds behind the audio, and of course the text is for the wrong channel anyway. Well, I'm getting dizzy and I doubt if I've touched 9% of the foibles, glitches, and grumbles with this software. More later, after I lie down for a while. (b) Which |
#2
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Catalyst Media Center, worst app ever?
On 1 Apr 2007 14:36:25 -0700
"Ancient_Hacker" wrote: I've seen dozens of bad, bad, crappy apps, but I think this takes the cake. I dunno, I'd pit the setup software for Logitech Harmony remote controls against any other app in the universe for title of worse app ever :-). Here's my rant: http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley/harmony.html |
#3
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Catalyst Media Center, worst app ever?
On Apr 1, 4:59 pm, Tom Horsley wrote:
On 1 Apr 2007 14:36:25 -0700 "Ancient_Hacker" wrote: I've seen dozens of bad, bad, crappy apps, but I think this takes the cake. I dunno, I'd pit the setup software for Logitech Harmony remote controls against any other app in the universe for title of worse app ever :-). Here's my rant: http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley/harmony.html And you know for the last five years since I went with ATi video cards and were talking more then just one, I have never had a problem with CCC. In fact I can't think of a single problem with either WinXP, WinXP Pro SP2 or my current WinXP Pro X64. |
#4
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Catalyst Media Center, worst app ever?
"Ancient_Hacker" wrote in message
oups.com... Ever have a dream where things are so unbeleivable, your mind goes "Wait, this must be a dream, reality could never be this bizarre? IMHO, so it is with Catalyst Media Center. I've seen dozens of bad, bad, crappy apps, but I think this takes the cake. rant snipped Hope all the typing got some of the frustration out of your system. Documentation for AIW and HDTV Wonder was on the disc in file named MMC*.pdf. Maybe they do similar for CMC. avsforum.com and hexus.net might have useful threads. Digital channel tuning is painfully slow on the HDTV Wonder(MMC) & actual HDTV. PBS here has 5 sub channels and a religious channel has 6. How are they to know what is wanted and not. Its become uncommon but stations still occasionally put out bad PID info. Sounds like you have a bad install but don't assume what your receiving from stations is correct. They still have problems. Have never seen CMC so can only hope this is helpful. Good Luck. |
#5
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Catalyst Media Center, worst app ever?
Pretty much my feelings also (about the Logitech Harmony setup
software). I don't feel as strongly as you do about "activities", but the idea of having made this web based vs. a local .exe application was just insane. Took me 20 hours to get it to do what I wanted, the way that I wanted. Tom Horsley wrote: On 1 Apr 2007 14:36:25 -0700 "Ancient_Hacker" wrote: I've seen dozens of bad, bad, crappy apps, but I think this takes the cake. I dunno, I'd pit the setup software for Logitech Harmony remote controls against any other app in the universe for title of worse app ever :-). Here's my rant: http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley/harmony.html |
#6
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Catalyst Media Center, worst app ever?
You painted a far too positive picture of the software. For starters, you
can't schedule a recording for more than 3.5 hours. That's actually not a problem, since the reliability of the scheduler is questionable unless you keep CMC open and on "TV". Otherwise, the scheduler will usually open CMC at the scheduled time, but may not actually open the tv tuner or initialize recording. Installing some versions of Samsung's MagicTune (a monitor control application) almost assured the problem, but the problem can occur even if MagicTune is not installed. Most annoying, CMC lacks the ability to perform a quick, timed, manual recording. If you want to record manually, CMC records until you click "stop" or you run out of disk space. As you noted, the TV Guide takes forever to download. Once it downloads, its not very useful. There's no grid of times and stations. You see the listings for only one station and one day at a time. If you want to risk the using scheduler, CMC provides a wonderfully clumsy interface. You scoll to set the starting and ending hour, minute, channel, am/pm, day of the week, etc. There's no ability to manually set the time of day. There's and undocumented feature where you can get to, lets say, the 50's in minutes, by scrolling to 5, then pressing 5, and finally scrolling to the correct minute. Oh, my ATI TV Wonder 650 records Dolby Digital Surround Sound. Too bad CMC, which comes with it, only records in stereo. CMC is a loser app. If ATI's MMC actually worked correctly, it would be an improvement over CMC. "Ancient_Hacker" wrote in message oups.com... Ever have a dream where things are so unbeleivable, your mind goes "Wait, this must be a dream, reality could never be this bizarre? IMHO, so it is with Catalyst Media Center. I've seen dozens of bad, bad, crappy apps, but I think this takes the cake. Some, just a small fraction, of its gotchas: (1) The installer, well, sometimes it installs some things. More often, it just flashes up full screen windows full of the ATI logo and some purple cool-aid splashes. Does it bother checking for oh, say, conflicting video or audio or drivers? Not really. It can detect an installation of it's real origin app, and uninstall some parts of IT. The "custom" install options have ludicrous choices, like the option to not install the parental control stuff, which, hold your sides, they claim takes 15 MB! ANy useful install options, like choosing a directory, well that's just not available, or hidden so well I can't find it. (2) Now you'd think, if an app that should be really fast, in order to juggle all that data in real time, you'd think they'd write it in real native code. Well, you'd be wrong. Instead it seems to be a lethargic .NET app, you know, the kind Microsoft themselves tried to do for Vista, but then even they chucked two years worth of work and went back to native code. So we have an app where key presses and mouse clicks, even on a 3200MHz PC, take, oh, one, two, three, or twenty seconds to register. Sweet. Oh, but back to the installer-- you'd think, if an app required .NET version x.y, an installer program would take the trouble to like maybe try checking for the existence of .NET, or to be really whizzy, the correct version thereof. You'd think, and I thought, but apparently the pinheads at ATI, no such thought crossed their mind. Well, that's not actually correct, it looks like they WENT OUT OF THEIR WAY to ignore anything along these lines. Because if you do a clean install of Windows (more later), the CMC installer silently skips the CMC installation, as there's no .NET framework around. Silently, like with not even a casual mention of, "Oh BTW, I'm not going to install CMC, as there's no .NET here". Sweet. (3) And even if you do somehow get CMC installed, they you get the joys of running it. Things like: (a) Splash screens. Russet-haired babes rotating, (not anti-aliased or synced to the frame rate BTW), in provocative poses. ATI: If I want splash screens, I think I can find them. If I want to stare at hot Russet-haired babes in black leather cooter-high boots, I suspect there is a site somewhere on the Internet devoted to just that kink. I was kinda hoping for something like, video software. Of the setup screens, you wouldnt beleive our rants, so let's just say the setup screens are non-intuitive, non-grammatical, overly-nested, unhelpful, undocumented, slow, VERY BUGGY, and frustrating to boot. Something as simple as setting up the channels you want is almost impossible. First, you can't just type in "Channel 4-WCCO", et al. You have to let the software go through a slow, out of sync, channel scan (which on one button is labeled "SCAN CHANNELS", and on the next similar but not quite page "FIND STATIONS". What should take seconds takes many minutes, and even when it's done, you're likely to have a garbled list of channels it "found", most are likely to be mislabled, i.e. PBS Kids video is likely to show up under "Station 7", whatever that means, meanwhile there are from five to SEVENTY identical copies of "WFTW-67" the software entered into the channel list. Which is nearly impossible to edit, thanks to all the slow wide glare-spangled buttons which rarely do anything useful or correct. There *is* an option which warms your heart the first time you see it-- an option to download a "TV Guide". For free! Wow, now that's a nice feature. Or it would be, if it functioned at all. Sometimes it presents you with the wide purple flashy button labeled "titan". That's all. Yo're somehow supposed, by osmosis I guess, to know what that is. But never mind, it doesnt matter a whit whether you know what titan is or not. Because when you press the button, yet another slow progress bar appears, widens up to 40%, and then hangs. No TV guide appears, no error messages, no suggestions as to what to do to ameliorate, improve, sidestep, bypass, jump over, or fix whatever problem is indicated by this particular hang. (c) Now maybe by this point you think, well, this guy didnt bother reading the manual, or the on-line help, or the link to the helpful FAQ site. Well, usually you'd be right. And this time you're right too. Because I didnt go to any of those places BECAUSE THEY ARE EITHER BLANK OR DON'T EXIST. Yep, a 21st century app with no visible help. Well, that's not quite true. If you wander thru the purple button majesty, you eventually stumble on a page with buttons labeled "HELP", "WHAT's NEW", "NOTICES", and your heart warms. But the quickly cools when yu find out that no matter how many of these buttons you press, no matter how hard, all you get are empty pages. White screens. (d) Now on the UP side, after you try reinstalling CMC, and then reinstall Windows when CMC messes up everything in the video and audio driver and codec chains, then repeat installing .NET 2.0, and you wait for CMC to find a few channels, and duplicates in spades, you migth EVENTUALLY be greeted with some actual real-time video from the TV tuner. But just a few caveats: (A) The video appears in something like FOUR preset sizes-- too small (preview size), about the size of a Zoraastrian 4 Shekel stamp. Kinda almost good (37/49ths of the screen, or if you accidentally (accidentally as there's no mention of this feature), if you click on the 33/46th screen size image, it flips into full-screen mode. Can you choose size, position, resolution? Not as far as I can see. (B) the 37/48th screen image is surrounded by WHITER THAN WHITE. Whiter than Oxydol white. If you turn down the brightness with you' monitor's controls, the video image is mighty dim. No problem you think, EVERY TV made since 1939 has had brightness and contrast controls. Every video card, even a few ATI cards, come with software brightness and contrast sliders. So obviously CMC has BRIGHTNESS and CONTRAST virtual knobs, twirlers, sliders, or scroll boxes, wheels, or skis? Nope. Not as far as I can see. (C) So you learn to put up with watching the infomercial channel, dimly, with CMC's text boxes advertising this as the PBS kids channel 2. After a while, the thrill of watching murky Popeil Food dehydrator commercials wears a bit thin. So you consider changing the channel. No problem you think as you reach for the TV. Every TV made since 1939 has channel switching knobs NO? And there's even less possibility that CMC is lacking a channel switching knob, as of course knobs on a screen do not cost anything for the bakelite and brass setscrew, the knob is VIRTUAL, just a screen image. Hmm, no knob visible. There are a fewe large purple menus on the left, but the one labled in Japengrish as "CHAN MOVE" or somesuch, is useless, as it brings up all 79 mistakenly logged copies of the infomercial channel, and either scrolls through them too slowly, or too quickly, with a gratuitous "bounce" as if the channel numbers are ona one-armed bandit. Come to think of it, this does have a lot in common with gambling. It turns out there are at least two other and undocumented ways to change channels. I fyou hover the cursor in the lower left of the screen, a bunch of tiny inscrutable purple circles appear, some of them with cockroaches, civil-defense symbols, and less identifiable hieroglyphs on them. Turns out the seventh from the left iis the channel up button. Which works, slowly, oh so slowly, like one channel every five seconds on a 3300+ PC, and even then the channel text is twelve seconds behind the video, which is three seconds behind the audio, and of course the text is for the wrong channel anyway. Well, I'm getting dizzy and I doubt if I've touched 9% of the foibles, glitches, and grumbles with this software. More later, after I lie down for a while. (b) Which |
#7
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Catalyst Media Center, worst app ever?
When it comes to hardware, ATI does themselves alright. The TV Wonder 650 works just fine with Windows Media Center, and I can schedule recordings just fine on it. My only beef with WMC is that it records in a format that I can't convert so I can watch it on my iPod. Supposedly in Catalyst Media Center it records in MPEG2 which I can easily convert. I had to work on Superbowl Sunday and I wanted to be able to watch it on my iPod during my school break. (don't tell me who won, mmkay? lol) So I set up a recording in Catalyst Media Center. Big mistake. I got home to find my "Recorded TV" folder empty. Good job, crappy ATI software. Good job. Maybe it's karma kicking my *** for not first obtaining expressed written consent from the National Football League. Conclusion: Catalyst Media Center = complete crap. Thank you. |
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