Things really fell down for the VoodooTV in software quality. The interfaces for both the TV and FM software leave much to be desired. The TV software meets our minimum interface needs, with actual buttons that let you specify a channel, but quality settings and presets are buried in a menu. The interface is also extremely small, so you absolutely have to use the pop up button explainers to know what a button does. 3dfx needs to provide a larger remote control with more controls. They should also make the window drag resizable.

The TV software's greatest fault is that when you size the window to full screen and then go back to a windowed screen, you lose all video. You still can hear the audio, but the video turns black and stays that way until you restart the TV software. Not a good "feature" in our books. The TV software also lacks time-shifting, but you can set it to record at a certain time on a certain channel and you can use third party time shifting software with the VoodooTV 200.

The positive side of the TV software is that, knowing its limits, it is fully functional. You can record video easily and it doesn't look half bad. For $99, if you want TV, it does a good job on the basics. We just cannot say the same for the FM tuner or tuner software.

The FM tuner application has a much worse interface. In order to enter the number of a station you want, you have to go into an options menu under presets. The actual interface forces you to use up and down buttons that have extremely slow reaction times. Imagine if it takes you two seconds to move from 102.3 to 102.4, how painful it will be to get to 105.3. Speaking of 105.3, when we set our preset to that frequency, the software would somehow change to 105.2. Repeated attempts to set 105.3 as a preset repeatedly presented us with 105.2. We hope a software patch can fix the problems because we really don't like the software as it is.

One nice feature of the FM tuner software is that you can record straight to MP3. If you have good reception, this would be a great way to build your MP3 hit collection, assuming you can receive more than just NPR (which was all we could get in our poor reception location).