7. TV Playback And Recording

You can access MCE's TV functions either through the onscreen menu or by pushing the Live-TV shortcut key on the MCE remote control. When you switch to use other MCE functions while watching TV, a thumbnail view of the playback window stays open on screen. That makes it easier to record another show or to use Windows Messenger for a quick chat without losing track of whatever you're watching at the time. Should the phone or doorbell ring, you can call on MCE's easy time shift to resume watching your broadcast where you left off.

The timeline display shows where time shifting started, and also lets you jump quickly through recorded content to get back to real time viewing.

One push of the pause button is all is takes to freeze the TV display, while recording picks up in the background. This also provides a handy way to skip over commercial breaks. In our test setup we noticed no significant difference in image quality between live TV and time-shifted playback.

While watching TV it takes only one push on the remote control's info button to capture information about the running program. You can also make rapid changes to the TV display on screen (from full-screen to windowed to thumbnail view). With a dual tuner TV card, you can watch one program with MCE 2005 while recording another in the background.