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Free Utility: DHCAT 2.0 available now
Hi. Our team here at Intel has built a tool called the Intel Digital Home Capabilities Assessment Tool (DHCAT), and we've just released version 2.0.
DHCAT is a whole new kind of PC evaluation instrument that grew out of a realization that the PC industry's usual goodness metric - speed - doesn't adequately describe what a home theater PC (HTPC) is capable of doing.
We needed some way to quantify the quality of experience.
For this we teamed up with Intel's experimental psychologists and video experts in Intel's User-Centered Design Group, which designed the perceptual models at the heart of DHCAT 2.0. A perceptual model objectively maps measurable performance attributes to mean opinion scores of groups of end-users with high predictive power. Think of it as a jury test without the jury.
DHCAT is part of our effort to get the PC industry to think beyond the speedometer, and evolve platform evaluation to the next level. It's the ideal instrument for evaluating your HTPC's capabilities, and reports results in the terms that matter most: the quality of media experience.
DHCAT 2.0 is also another tool in your calibration toolbox. In the same way you use Digital Video Essentials or Avia to dial in your display settings, or THX Optimizer or the PMI Audio Toolkit to calibrate your audio subsystem, DHCAT 2.0 can also help you get the most out of your HTPC.
In version 2.0, we've added support for Windows Vista, an AutoUpdate feature, and shortened the test run-time.
I invite you to order a free copy of DHCAT 2.0 by visiting the Intel Capabilities.
I'm new here, and due to spamming rules (which I support and also use at ICF), I can't yet post the URL here to get DHCAT, but if you do a search for "DHCAT 2.0", you'll be able to go to the site and order your DVD.
If you have any questions, please post them here or in the ICF forums.
Cheers,
Dave Salvator
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