CDFreaks presents a series of Questions and Answers with people working in the Electronics industry. Questions are gathered by posting a thread in the forums where community members can ask people working in the Electronics industry what they always really wanted to know.
Afterwards the questions are collected, sent to the right person and the answers are posted here, at CDFreaks.com.
This week we post the answers to your questions asked from Luis Fernandez, Sales Director for MSI.
Questions and Answers - MSI
1. Could you tell something about MSI’s history in consumer electronics?
MSI has a long history in the design and manufacturing of consumer electronics, with a special focus on MP3 Players, portable Media Players and Portable storage. A few milestones have been the introduction of the first USB stick size MP3 Player in 2001 and the fact that for 2 years in a row MSI won the IFA design award. In 2006 MSI decided to fully focus on OEM manufacturing the Consumer Electronics products, meaning we still produce a huge quantity of MP3/Portable media players but not under our own brand name.
For the consumer market, we now put all our efforts on our extensive line-up of Notebooks and TV-Tuner Products. Also we have a broad line-up of high quality multimedia products such as webcams, gaming mice etc.
This means that besides the strong presence of MSI motherboards and VGA products in the traditional computer shop you will see a lot of MSI branded products in Consumer Electronics shops and hypermarkets.
2. With the growing market for touch-screen media players such as the Apple iTouch, does MSI plan coming out with touch screen players?
No, like explained before, not under our own brand name however, we might come up with some solution for our OEM partners.
3. The MSI TV@nywhere Satellite card specifications mention that it supports HDTV receiving. Does this mean that the card supports DVB-S2? If not, does MSI plan introducing a DVB-S2 card?
With MSI’s TV@nywhere Satellite you can Watch and Record Digital Satellite TV & Radio programs (DVB-S) and support HDTV receiving.
Soon we will have a new product called MSI TV@nywhere Satellite II which allows receiving DVB-S and DVB-S2 TV programs. This product should be available within the next few weeks.
4. Does MSI offer any CAM support or add-on for its DVB-T or DVB-S cards, such as to watch Pay-TV services?
Currently we only have a product that can support CAM for DVB-S card, but soon we will have a new product called “MSI TV@nywhere-CI” that will Support DVB-CI(Common Interface), it will include an PCMCIA CAM Reader and Accessory for TV@nywhere Satellite II
5. As MSI already offers several USB DVB-T tuners, is there any plan to introduce USB DVB-S tuners also, such as to watch satellite TV on a laptop?
No, we don’t have any plans for a USB DVB-S product. This decision is based on some market research we did.
6. Does MSI plan offering Linux or Mac OS support for its digital terrestrial or satellite tuner cards?
We are already working on the MAC OS support but for Linux we have no plans at all. During Computex in Taiwan we will releasea series of MAC OS products.
7. I have a TV@!Anywhere Plus. I bought it to replace my TV!Anywhere Master so that I could use Vista Ultimate. It works fine on Windows XP Pro SP-2, but on Vista Ultimate, the remote can not find the application, so I have to manually open it before using the remote. Also, after installing SP-1, the TV@Anywhere application will not work., I says wrong floating point. The FM radio will work, but no Television. I use two hard drives with different OS. It works fine on the XP OS, but not Vista Ultimate. I am using the Vista drivers and application on Vista. I am using 32 Bit. It is an MSI motherboard KT3 Ultra ARU 6380 E with an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ and 2GB RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 XGE 256MB video card. Both Hard Drives are Seagate 300GB. XP Master, Vista Slave, dual boot.
For the remote control issues you can use the new driver that is available: version v1.3.3.2. For Vista SP1 there is also a patch available. You can download the driver and the patch here:
http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=downloaddetail&type=driver&maincat_no=132&prod_no=616
For your other issue, our Multimedia team is working on this problem and we will try to upload the new application on the MSI website as soon as possible. Thank you for this feedback.
We would like to thank Luis Fernandez for cooperating with us and answering the questions.
