Star Media Center 0.92 Review
Star Media Center is designed to be a fast and smart tool that enables you to do pretty much everything with your audio-video hardware. At the moment Star Media Center has 5 main functions:
1. A very low resource demanding video player with tons of features. Refer to the howto section.
2. A TV viewing program. Star Media Center requires a TV-card with wdm drivers installed. It should work with every card out there as long as it's drivers are fully compatible with DirectX9.
3. A FM tuning program. Star Media Center requires a TV-card (or a specialized radio capture card) with wdm drivers installed.
4. A DVD player. Star Media Center is capable of DVD playback as long as you have proper decoder installed in your system.
5. A video broadcasting server. This means that you can use your TV-card to broadcast (share) your favorite TV programs with your LAN friends and even on the Internet. When in broadcasting mode Star Media Center becomes a chat server and users can connect to it with Star Remote Chat to chat about, get and set channels. Also, Star Media Center supports broadcasting from video files on your harddrive and directly from your desktop.
Star Media Center offers interconnected features - for example when watching a movie and you want to quickly tune to a news station for just a few minutes you may simply do that and when you're done you can quickly resume your movie with only one click - no more changing from software to software, overlay conflicts and so on... For more info about the Star Media Center features please refer to the howto section.
Star Media Center system requirements:
CPU: In order to play most video files you will need a Celeron @ 466 MHZ or more powerful. Note, that for broadcasting you will need a more powerful processor - Pentium III @ 733 or higher. For tv-card viewing the minimum processor requirement is Pentium @ 233 MHZ.
RAM: 48 Megabytes.
Video card: For maximum quality output you will need a video card with overlay and VMR9 support (any Radeon or GeForce class video card). Minimum requirement: any DirectX comptatible video card.
TV-Card: Optional. Any capture device with appropriate WDM drivers installed.
HDD: Star Media Center is so small that you can run the program directly from your browser, or a floppy disk.
Network: Optional. For broadcasting mode you will need at least a 56 kbps modem. The quality will increase proportionally to your connection speed.
Other requirements: DirectX9c installed. You will also need Windows Media Format 9. Star Media Center is a directshow based application - therefore directshow codecs are needed. To decode most multimedia files you will need to download SMC Components (included in the Star Media Center Full Package).
