One of the things that has become very apparent to me over the last year is that my TV viewing habits have completely changed.  In the past, I would either watch TV shows live or DVR them and watch them later that same day or night.  Lately I have found that my wife and I often catch up with our favorite TV shows (Lost, Heroes, The Office, Lie To Me, and 24) on the weekend, when life slows down a bit.  We will either watch them on the DVR in our media room, or we will watch them using Hulu on our Bedroom TV (using a PC).   Occasionally we will even use our Slingbox to stream the shows from our media room to the PC in the bedroom.

Recently however, my bedroom PC has started to show its age, and has become a bit unreliable.  I decided one easy way for me to test out the DV2, was to hook it right to my TV and see what happened. 

I had a DV2 at the house anyway, since I was using one for AMD Fusion Media Explorer testing.  With the DV2’s nice and convenient HDMI port I figured this would be a snap.  I proceeded to run an HDMI cable between my Visio 37” LCD, and the DV2.  Within less than 5 minutes I was up and running.  While I was able to use the DV2’s integrated keyboard and mouse for navigation, I found myself missing the convenience of a wireless keyboard and mouse.  I hooked up my Gyration mouse, and it automatically loaded the driver and I was in business less than a minute later.

In addition to being able to stream content from my favorite TV sites (Hulu, Fancast, Veoh, TV.com, nbc.com, abc.com, etc.),  I was also able to watch my collection of archived movies, and TV shows, as well as Blu-Ray and DVD movies.  I like to save my movies and TV shows in either WMV or DiVX file formats.  Unfortunately, most CE devices won’t play either of these formats.  The nice thing about a PC, like the DV2, is support is only a codec install away.

Another feature I put to quick use, is the Sling Media Player, which comes preinstalled on the DV2.  I have only 1 cable box in my house, (and hoping to get to none when my Time Warner contract runs out), so I use a SlingBox to get premium content from that box to the rest of the house.  I have my DVR setup to automatically record many of the shows listed earlier in the post.  As soon as I clicked on the Sling icon, it found my SlingBox, and after entering my password, I was watching TV in seconds.  It was a very intuitive and seamless experience.

As for the video quality in each of these uses cases are concerned, here if what I found:

Blu-Ray – Excellent.  Looked about as good as my PS3

DiVX/WMV – Very Good.  While not as stunning as Blu-Ray, I was more than happy with the playback

Slingbox – Very Good.  It was as good as I had seen it on any other PC I have tried it on.

Youtube/Hulu – Good.  Youtube playback can only be as good as the content.  The DV2 seemed to play it as well as any other PC I have tried.  As for Hulu, my experience was mixed.  The visual quality was very good, but I did notice an occasional stutter.  My wife didn’t notice it though, so maybe I am just ultra picky.  It was still watchable, but wasn’t quite as smooth as it was on my quad-core “Dragon” platform system.

AMD Fusion Media Explorer – Good. Installing Fusion Media Explorer on the system was really the highlight of the experience for me.  Now I was able to surf the web while I watched TV or movies.  That is what I call “getting it done.”  Give me a 6 pack of Diet Coke and I am good for hours. 

I also really enjoyed the photo, music, and video experiences.  I found it very easy to navigate and find what I was looking for.  The performance of the ribbon isn’t as smooth as it is on higher end systems, but it was still quite usable.  I loved clicking on a song, and having it present music videos to me from Youtube.  I wasted about an hour just doing that. 

All said and done, I was really happy with my experience using the DV2 as a mobile media center.  The other nice thing is I can take it in the car and hand it to the kids in the back seat, and now they are good for hours.  As a standard notebook, the DV2 is great; but I really fell in love with this notebook’s better than expected multimedia capabilities.

Casey Gotcher is Director, Product Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

My name is Casey Gotcher, and this is my first official blog on AMD’s behalf.  I chose to wait a while, specifically to speak to this particular topic.  We have been working diligently for over a year now on this product, and I am very excited to finally take the wraps off of it publicly.

What is AMD Fusion Media Explorer?

Already convinced?  Get it here.

The AMD Fusion Media Explorer (FME) is a new 3D Immersive Social Media and Digital Media Browser, built and distributed by AMD.  In addition to enabling unique multimedia and social media experiences, FME does a great job of showcasing the power of AMD CPUs and GPUs. This application demonstrates what our platforms are capable of when the software is designed to take full advantage.

AMD Fusion Media Explorer combines a user’s local media items, plus related online content from providers such as, Flickr, YouTube, and Microsoft Live.  In addition, FME has Facebook integration which gives our users even more options for posting or interacting with their favorite photos or friends’ photos.  All of this is managed by an integrated search engine, that makes it very easy to quickly locate what you are looking for.

I like to put the goals of the AMD Fusion Media Explorer into these 3 buckets:

• Explore – Explore your digital media content, from multiple local and online sources, in a quick and easy to use browser.
• Experience – Experience your media in a more exciting 3D, immersive application
• Discover – Discover new related photos, and videos, pertaining to what you are currently looking at or listening to.

Primary Features of Fusion Media Explorer

Photos

• Find and View photos from your local hard drive, removable USB or SD cards, and online sources, such as Flickr, Facebook, and Microsoft Live.

• View related photos and videos from some of these online sources, which pertain to what you are looking at in the main viewing area.  For example, if you are looking at  your photos of Paris, you might also be presented with other users’ photos or videos from the same area.

• Upload your photos to your Facebook or Flickr account with a simple button click.  This is  often much faster and easier than going through the Web UI’s for these services.

Music

• Easily find and listen to your favorite music with our integrated search engine or 3D Ribbon.
• Use our AutoDJ feature to automatically queue up playlists for you from the same genre or artist you are currently listening to.  Click on one song and AutoDJ will take it from there.
• Be presented with related music videos or other clips while you listen.  For example, if you are listening to U2, you will likely be presented with some of their music videos to the right in our related media bar.

Video

• As was the case with Photos and Music, easily find the video, movie, or TV show you are looking for with our integrated search engine or 3D Ribbon.
• See your video collection come to life as FME will actually start playing multiple videos in the ribbon, while you browse, making it easier to find what you are looking for.  The better the performance of the machine, the more videos FME can play simultaneously.
• Watch full screen or send to the integrated Mini player so you can surf the Web while you watch a movie.
• Be presented with related YouTube videos pertaining to the content you are currently watching.  For instance you might see cast interviews, bloopers, and sometimes even full episodes, depending on what FME can find on YouTube that relates to what you are watching.

Some other details to note about FME… It has been developed for our notebook platform technology, “Puma” and desktop platform technology, “Dragon.”  It will be provided free to our customers, via download from www.amd.com, or in some cases may come pre-installed on select AMD-based systems.

Concurrent with the posting of this blog, I am releasing a special build of Fusion Media Explorer for friends and family members.  This will supersede our public beta by a couple of weeks.  If you are interested in giving it a try, you can find it here, www.amd.com/fmepreview or find me on twitter at www.twitter.com/caseygotcher if you need the link or (especially) if you have feedback on the application.

* Internet access is required to take advantage of the online search / retrieval functions.

Casey Gotcher is Director, Product Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.