mediate uses advanced video rendering techniques to overlay our user interface directly onto video with full alpha blending, and no flickering or tearing artifacts. mediate uses a custom implementation of the latest Video Mixing Renderer technology available within Microsoft DirectX9 allowing full hardware acceleration.

This rendering technique allows even high resolution video content to be rendered flawlessly, either full screen or as a small preview whilst simultaneously navigating the mediate user interface.

mediate uses DirectShow technology for audio, video and DVD playback and so is able to support an extremely wide variety of popular audio, video and image file formats. mediate can also be extended to work with any additional video or audio formats by installing suitable codecs, many of which are freely available.

Image formats

• JPEG - Joint Photographic Expert Group images
• PNG - Portable Network Graphic images
• GIF - Graphics Interchange Format images
• BMP - Windows Bitmap images
• TIFF - Tag Image File Format images

Video formats

• AVI - AVI video container (e.g. DivX, XVid)
• MPEG - MPEG video format (e.g. MPEG2 DVD format)
• WMV - Windows Media Video format
• IFO - DVD volumes (either on DVD or Hard disk)

Audio formats

• MP3 - MPEG Level 3 audio format
• WAV - Windows WAV audio format
• WMA - Windows Media Audio format
• CDA - CD Audio format (Audio CD tracks)
• MIDI - MIDI digital music format

mediate now includes support for viewing current and forecast weather conditions for virtually all locations around the globe. Weather settings can be configured using easily with your remote using an on screen keyboard.

We hope to add other information services very soon.

Enjoy exciting animated visualisations to accompany your music. Again, these are integrated with the mediate user interface and may be viewed full screen or as a small preview whilst navigating or selecting other music to play.

mediate takes a completely multimedia approach to handling your media. Although the notional idea of music, video and picture content groups is used, each group can contain a variety of media types.

For example, your music videos, album art and MP3 files can all be grouped together as music and all used in the same playlist. Similarly, video clips taken with your digital camera are grouped together with pictures so that you can enjoy multimedia slide shows of both video and images, all accompanied by music playing alongside.

mediate allows two simultaneous playlists to be played, one containing music or video, and the other containing images. This makes it extremely easy to pause a slideshow, choose some accompanying music and then resume the slideshow with just a few presses of the remote.

mediate also allows you to use any video file as an audio accompaniment to your slideshow as well as any audio file. Once the slideshow finishes, mediate automatically starts to display the accompanying video. Start another slideshow and the video is then replaced with your pictures whilst the sound plays in the background. Dual playlists give you complete flexibility.

mediate includes its own intelligent screensaver that will activate after a configurable delay to prevent screen burn on your television or projector. The screensaver displays a rotating image which can be customised if required, and is able to recognise when a slideshow, video or audio visualisation is playing full screen and will not interrupt enjoyment of your media. Whilst mediate is running the normal Windows screensaver is automatically disabled.

mediate has built in context sensitive help screens throughout its user interface, so if you ever get stuck or are wondering what options are available to you, help is just a button press away.

mediate uses an extremely powerful theme engine to render its user interface. Unlike other applications which support limited "skinning", mediate themes offer the ultimate in customisation, as well as providing support for multiple languages.

mediate themes allow you to add entirely new screens, reposition, add or remove additional buttons, menu items, prompts, animations, graphics or sounds. mediate includes a variety of themes with more available for download from our website. Or why not create or modify your own theme?

mediate uses a well documented XML structure to describe its user interface. A simple text editor is enough to begin designing your own mediate themes - absolutely no programming skills are required. A free theme designer application will also soon be available to make this even easier, using a fully graphical interface.

mediate includes a very easy to use mediate media manager (mmm) application to allow additional media folders to be shown within mediate. These can be from a variety of sources including local drives, CD or DVD-ROM, network shares, attached storage devices or even USB pen drives. Each can be given a friendly name and grouped together within mediate so that a variety of different locations can be viewed seamlessly as a combined media collection.

Folders are added to music, video or picture groups using a few mouse clicks and are then instantly available within mediate - no need to endure a lengthy import process before you can access your media.

mediate is designed around the principle of having two distinct methods of use - for configuring your media it provides full support for keyboard and mouse like any other windows application. However, once you've finished configuring your media for use within mediate (which takes just a few seconds), kick back and grab your remote to browse through and enjoy your media collection without being bothered by windows running in the background.

mediate can be driven entirely through the keyboard, and so supports a range of remote control devices. We recommend using the Streamzap remote control as this includes additional support for launching mediate simply by pressing the power button, as well as direct access buttons for music, video and picture menus.

mediate is fully configurable to support other remote controls, so long as these are able to simulate keypresses. Alternatively, or for more advanced configurations mediate is fully compatible with Girder allowing a wide range of control devices to be used.

Once configured with a suitable remote control, mediate no longer requires a keyboard or mouse to be connected to your PC and so is ideal for use with dedicated home theatre (HTPC) setups.