Opening the iMedian software the first page we come to is the main menu page, as you would expect. From here you can access all the media on your pc, I didn’t even have to tell it where my stuff was, I assume I checks the “My….” Folders first as it went straight to my music collection and added it when I opened up the Music section. As you can see it already knew there were multiple folders within my music collection.

It wasn’t wrong.

As you can imagine it’s from here you can select and play tracks from your music collection, one minor thing that annoyed me is there is no stop button on screen you HAVE to use the remote control to stop the tracks, a minor irritation though as you will more than likely be using the remote anyway.

Next is the Videos folder, which looks very much like the music folder, I can report with some pleasure it does play HD I downloaded a small 720p H264 Quicktime movie which it played perfectly.

I chose the Duke Nukem Forever teaser, well it might be all we get to see of it.

Moving on to the Pictures menu, again we see the same format as the two previous menus, hey if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Next on the list is External Media I assume any external media you have plugged in, hard drive caddies, memory sticks etc will show up here, I did however find it a little confusing as it turns out iMedian thinks my BDROM drive is some kind of connected external media? I assume it is because, sadly, it doesn’t support Blue Ray format.

Moving on down the menu next is Network Media, as you might have already guessed this menu will allow you to connect to other pc’s on your network and access their shared folders. However it couldn’t see all the pc’s on my network even though the pc running the iMedian software could through Windows Explorer? It only seemed to see the pc’s connected directly to the router not the other pc’s connected to the router via a hub.

Only 2 pc’s listed, yet others are on there and accessible through other software.

Next in the menu is CD/DVD, as you might expect this is where you access any CD/DVD inserted into your optical drive.

The next item on the menu is TV, this probably needs no introduction but as you can see you need to configure it first. As Imedian doesn’t actually have its own TV tuner software you have to use an “external” viewer, i.e. link to another piece of software, which you need to set up in the settings menu.

Onto the penultimate option in the main menu, Tasks, the only thing you can do from within here is power down and search for videos and music. As there is a power switch on the remote I really fail to see the point of this section as you could put the search function elsewhere as it’s not really what I would expect to see filed under “Tasks”.

The final setting is Settings, this is quite a large section in its own right, as you can imagine, it’s from here you basically set the whole program up.

The first item in the Settings menu is General Settings, from here you can set up a vast number of things, far too many to take individual screenshots of and go into in detail but I will try and explain, if somewhat briefly what can be done from within the menu.

Clicking on Settings / General brings up another quite large menu where you can choose a different background / Font / Sound Level / EQ / Customise the menus (which you wish to show) to name a few, it is quite extensive to say the least.

The next section is Media Play, again this is quite a large section so not really practical to show every option of every section so I will give brief rundown of the options.

Zoom is where you choose a screen format, i.e. 4:3 / 16:9 / etc or you can leave it set to Source so it will just fill the screen and leave a boarder either at the side or top and bottom depending on the format of the video.

Playback is where you set the interval between fast forward / rewind jumps, in seconds. Filter Control section you can set up / select various audio and video decoders as well as speaker outputs, including DTS / Pro Logic etc etc.

Video processing lists numerous items, not sure if codec is the correct term for them, including various options like Direct 3D (with various options for DX7 and 9, no 8 though?).

Audio processing, not shown but off the screen shot, like the video processing menu it has several options within including a Normaliser, I believe this boosts quite audio and cuts loud audio sequences, an EQ section with various options like Normal (flat), Club, Rock, Classical etc.

Renderer, again not shown in the screen shot, this is where you select your audio output decoder if you wish to use something other than the systems default decoder.

Subtitle processing here you can choose to switch subtitles on / off, font style, language, sync interval, even how the fonts are rendered.

Colour Control the final section is where you can set up the picture using contrast / saturation, brightness, hue, gamma, separate red / green and blue controls.

Basically there should be enough to tweak to keep even the most fussy of people happy and get their set up “just right”.

The final section is the Initial Setup Wizard, as the name suggests this is normally run upon running Imedain for the first time but you can rerun it at any time also. Some of the items you can set up from here can be set up or at least changed from within other menus but are all bundled into this one. The only ones that are significantly different are: - Media Library allows you to set how the names of files etc are viewed, artist / track / album etc for music files, the Display section allows you to move the display and resize it. Audio just allows you to select your speaker type, 5.1 / 7.1 / 2.0 etc. the other options appear to be as per elsewhere in the set up section.

The next option on the set up menu is Media Library by clicking on this you bring up another, quite extensive menu. It is from here you can set up how you want all of the various libraries to be displayed.

As mentioned before, the Music Library is probably the most definable and can be set up in several ways, by Artist / Album / Genre mixture of any of the above or various other ways. The other folders are set up in a similar fashion, but obviously with slight differences. The Picture Library for example has Date Taken. The External and Network Library has an option to be displayed or not.

The next section to set up is the Media option. From this section you set up the settings for your Music / Video and Pictures. The options for Music and Video are basically the same, and cover Repeat / Shuffle and resume and allow you to enable / disable each of them. Pictures is slightly different and the options within are for setting the time they are onscreen before moving onto the next one and how the transition takes place for the slideshow. Reset sets all functions to default settings.

The penultimate section in the Settings Menu is the DVD section, as the title would suggest it is here you set up the DVD player functions. Under the General settings in this section you can set up your preferred language for menus / audio and video and how you would like the playback to resume upon restarting the software, choices include Resume From Last Scene, Always Start From Beginning and Prompt Before Playback Resumes. The Navigator option is a little confusing to be honest, clicking on it takes you to a menu where you can select from several choices for you “Navigator”, including Nero / Nvidia / Intervideo / Cyberlink, or the System default, I assume these are all the “Navigators” it has found on my system? Also in this section you have the option of enabling Closed Caption Decoder as well as Internal Audio and Video Transform Filters, which if I am honest I have no idea what they are. Under the Decoder menu you can choose from numerous decoders from the internal ones or MPEG2 Audio and Video, DTS, AC3, or LPCM. The final option is Renderer, which I believe is also covered elsewhere, and allows you to choose the Audio and Video output codec / device.

The final section under Settings is TV, as I explained before the Imedian software doesn’t have its own TV software in so you will need to link it to the TV software of your choice. Most TV cards come with some sort of viewing software so this, hopefully, shouldn’t be a problem, I however think something should be built in as there are bound to be issues somewhere along the line. To set it up you basically have to navigate to your TV viewing software which, I assume, Imedian then runs with its own front end. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to actually prove this as I use Windows Media Centres own TV viewing software and have no idea where Windows hides it.

I think that’s all the options / menus covered but the programs menu structure is so large I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if I have missed something so I apologise if that is the case.

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