The TV Connection
After following safe ejection procedures from your PC, you can power down the TVisto and connect it to your TV. The unit ships with all the cables you need for NTSC viewing in stereo, and again, you should have no trouble connecting these standard inputs to your home video system.
One of the really great things about the TVisto was finding out that this little box also supports high quality audio and video. The standard unit ships with support for everything from Composite NTSC video up through 1080i, (although you need to purchase an optional cable for component HDTV connections). It also supports 5.1 audio via an SPDIF connector. Combining these two features means you can watch your stored DVDs without compromising on audio or video quality.
I purchased the add-on component cable so I could get the benefit of higher resolution DVD viewing--an annoying $30 expense, but if you have an HDTV it is well worth it.
Once you connect the TVisto to your TV, you may find that the default video settings aren't correct. This can be remedied by simply cylcing through the various possibilities by repeatedly pressing the TV Out button on the remote. Eventually you'll see the menu in Figure 4. (Please note that these are low-res 640x480 screen captures; your HDTV viewing will be much crisper than what you see here.)
A nice, simple interface. The place where you will spend most of your time is in Movies, Music, and Pictures. The only thing I've done in the settings menu is pin down my video output settings, but you also have a few other options, such as Languages, ScreenSaver, and so on.
The three media buttons--Movies, Music, and Pictures--all have what amounts to nothing more than a folder browser interface. You plow through the files that you have loaded in the appropriate folder and select what you want to see, hear, or look at. Once you are in playback mode there are naturally quite a few more options, but the selection process is dead simple.
