CyberLink MagicSports 3.5: It Might Change the way You View Recorded Sports Events
Written: Apr 22 '07 (Updated May 10 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Accurately identifies hilites from baseball games, and (presumably) soccer and sumo wrestling broadcasts.
Cons: Resource intensive, only works with broadcast sports, limited file formats supported.
The Bottom Line: MagicSports lives up to its billing, if you like to watch broadcast baseball games, MagicSports is worth a look.
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| nc10's Full Review: CyberLink MagicSports for PC |
CyberLink’s MagicSports 3.5 is an application for sports fans who own home theater PC’s. MagicSports enhances viewing of recorded baseball games, soccer matches, and sumo wrestling bouts, by providing viewers more control over what parts of the games they watch. I recently received a review copy of MagicSports from CyberLink, and have been using it to view baseball games recorded on my home theater PC. MagicSports analyzes these recordings to indentify and rate significant events and highlights in the game, and then uses the results to…..
- create highlight videos of recorded games, allowing viewers to see all of a game’s important plays in a few minutes
- rate all of the events in a game 1 to 4 stars
- allow baseball viewers to watch the original recording, with a few new options, including jumping “pitch by pitch” through the game, and letting viewers jump directly to (and replay) any of 1-4 star rated hilights
When I first read about this software I was skeptical, how can a computer program recognize a good catch or when a batter gets a hit. I quickly found that MagicSports is surprisingly effective at analyzing a baseball game, despite my doubts. With most games it recognizes when each pitch occurs, when each run scores, and identifies the appropriate plays for a hilights clip.
MagicScore has a few limitations, though. It only works with baseball, soccer, and sumo wrestling. It works only with MPEG 2 and DVR-MS(Windows Media Center) video files. It won’t work with home recordings taken with a video camera. MagicScore is usually able to “read” the baseball “scoreboard” that baseball broadcasters place on the screen to show the score, count, and position of men on base, and uses that info to help identify events in the game. For one recording I made, MagicSports wasn’t able to pickup the scoreboard on a TBS (Turner) broadcast of a Braves game. MagicSports was still able to create a hilights clip for this game, but wasn’t able to identify the individual pitches, which meant I couldn’t use MagicSports to watch the game and step through it pitch by pitch, the feature I find to be MagicSports’ most useful.
Setup
I installed MagicSports on a Gateway Media Center PC with Pentium D 820 dual core processor, 1gb ram, and two 250gb hard drives. The TV tuner used to capture broadcasts was an external Hauppage WinTV USB PVR II, which has a hardware MPEG II encoder. The Gateway system can dual boot between Vista and Windows XP Media Center Edition, one hard drive is running XP Media Center, and the other is running Vista Home Premium. I installed MagicSports under both operating systems, and though I’ve used the Vista installation more, MagicSports seems to work with both operating systems. Note that MagicSports requires significant horsepower, CyberLink recommends at least a 2.6ghz CPU, and at least 200gb of disk space for working with video files.
I download MagicSports from the CyberLink website, and found the installation to be straightforward. After installing, you’ll need to specify whether you’ll be using a 4:3 aspect or wide screen monitor, but not much else. MagicSports offer 5 different quality options for the hilite video’s it outputs, a Dolby Digital sound option, an option to fade in/out between highlights.
Using MagicSports
Once you’ve recorded a game with Windows Media Center or other PVR (personal video recorder) software, you’ll want to view it with MagicSports rather than Media Center or other software.
Viewing recordings with MagicSports requires a few steps…
1. Navigate to the recording within MagicSports and then add the recording to the appropriate library (Baseball, Soccer, or Sumo)
2. Ask Magic Sports to “analyze” the recording. Typically it takes 30 minutes on my PC, to analyze a 3 hour recording, and MagicSports utilizes most of my PC’s resources to analyze a recording.
3. After analysis, you can watch the original recording using MagicSports. MagicSports acts like a typical media player at this point, with play, pause, and fastforward options, but also a few new options. The interface is very similar to the Windows Media Center interface, only a few icons, large enough to see from a 10 foot viewing distance. Like Media Center and other PVR software, MagicSports will work with your home theater PC’s remote.
When viewing an “analyzed” recording, you also have a few new options. One is “next pitch” and a ”previous pitch” buttons. Clicking on the next pitch button takes the viewer immediately to the pitcher winding up for his next pitch, something MagicSports does with 100% accuracy.
Another button brings up thumbnail images for all of the highlight events MagicSports has identified, along with a rating of 1-4 stars for each. Viewers can scroll through the thumbnails, click on a 4 star rated event for example, and usually see a home run or other major play, and then pick up the game from there.
4. MagicSports will also create a hilite video of your game, stringing together the most significant highlight events into one clip. You can determine the length of the clip, and choose to include or exclude certain events, but I’ve found that MagicSports does a pretty good job with its default settings, reducing a 3 hour game to about 10 minutes worth of highlights. This is fortunate, since it’s a tedious process to find, identify, and mark clips for inclusion in the hilite video.
I’ve used MagicSports to analyze games recorded from ESPN, WGN (Cubs, White Sox), Fox Sports Southwest (Astro’s), and our local cable company (a college game).
I’ve also used MagicSports to analyze a game broadcast on TBS, but it wasn’t able to “find” the scoreboard on that broadcast. While MagicSports was able to create a highlight video for this game, it was not able to identify the pitches, and therefore didn’t provide the next and previous pitch buttons during viewing. In the case of another college game I recorded, MagicSports identified the on screen scoreboard, but not the location of score boxes. In those cases, MagicSports provides a tool for identifying the scoreboard features to improve its accuracy.
Conclusion
I’ve found MagicSports identifies the hilite events in baseball games very accurately, particularly in major league games. The ratings it gives highlights are usually accurate, but I’ve noticed it rates highlights from major league games more accurately than it rates highlights from college games.
The quality of the hilite videos that MagicSports can output is only a bit less than the original source material at the highest quality setting. At this setting, a 12-13 minute video can require almost a gigabyte of disk space. For those of us with analog tuners on media center PC’s, this means the quality is good enough for full screen playback on a PC, approaching the quality of good online video’s or VHS recordings, but not something you'd impress with on a HDTV.
Recommended:
Yes
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