AMD Live Explorer

Well here’s another reason for owners of AMD processors to be proud: The AMD Live Explorer. It’s a little utility that allows you to view your Music, Video, Pictures and TV collection in 3D! Not only that, but it also allows you to log onto the net and get your online TVs streamed onto your PC.

The effects are great with the media zooming in at you and starting to play. You can go full screen with the button at the top, or go back to the previous view, which will cause the media to play at the top right hand corner of the Explorer. In the video tab, the main focused video in the Live Explore Mode, starts playing so that you can preview it. But sadly, this happens without the sounds. But then again some people might want the preview to be this way. You also get a “live” search, where the media starts to lists it as you type in the search letters, much like the search feature of Vista. Very “Lively” indeed. And…oh yeah…it also have a tiled view, if you don’t want the 3D view, which can be switched with a single click.

Weighing at around 5MB, it’s a very light weight installer. But the program does a very good job of showing all the media. On my first run, it automatically detected my media, my songs and videos stored in a separate drive, automatically. It’s very easy to configure, all the things through the settings link located at the top right hand corner of the interface.

But all these things come with a catch. You need a pretty good processor to be able to pull this, a dual core is minimum, although a quad-core is recommended. And it’s also one of those things that only the users of Vista can enjoy, as it doesn’t support the earlier OSes. The official minimum Requirements are:

AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 dual-core processor 4000+
1GB DDR RAM
DirectX9 GPU (e.g. ATI X1200 or NVIDIA 6150)
Windows Vista®
10MB Free HDD space
Broadband connection to Internet

And the recommended:

AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 dual-core processor 5200+
2GB DDR2 RAM
AMD 580X chipset or NVIDIA nForce 500 chipset (AM2 socket)
DirectX10 GPU (ATI 2400HD or NVIDIA 8300)
Windows Vista® Ultimate or Home Premium
SATA2 7200 RPM HDD with 16+ MB cache and NCQ
TV Wonder™ 650 Combo PCI-E tuner
Wired, high speed connection to Internet

You can also run it on a Laptop, for which the requirements can be found at here.

Too bad there's no skins for the Explorer. It would've been a very good addition. Though there are separate plugins for it, available on the above mentioned page. Though I haven't tried them out yet, mainly due to technical reasons, I'll be trying them out pretty soon. But I would recommend the users of iTunes to go ahead and download the FusionTunes plugins to integrate their iTunes Library into the Explorer. Get it here.

As a recommendation, since this uses Windows Media Player for playback, ensure that you have the necessary codec (K-Lite Mega Codec Pack recommended) installed for being able to view all the media, specially the videos.

Before I leave it’s not that Intel users can’t use it, but it’s a software tailored and made by AMD. After all it’s just a software, and besides I didn’t have access to an Intel Core’d system.

And here are my screenshots: