I agree with Chris L that Microsoft has severely dropped the ball when it comes to marketing and showing off the great features and capabilities of what you can do with media center, however I whole heartedly disagree with Thurott’s assessment of media center.
I just can’t see how Paul T can go there and say media center doesn’t work when he himself doesn’t even use one of its major features, TV tuning and DVRing.
The whole reason I use media center is for DVRing, its the #1 feature of media center I use. I have my main machine, my htpc directly connected to my projector setup in my basement, then I have two linksys extenders and an xbox 360 on other tv’s in my home to stream live TV but in my case mostly DVR’d TV.
I absolutely LOVE the feature of being able to start watching a tv show on one tv in my home, stop/pause it, shut everything down, and pick it back up later on a completely different tv in my house. Can’t do that with a cable co DVR.
#3 Now off to your points Mr. Geek, what do you mean by “multiple clients all with the same functionality and no need for synching etc. ” what do you mean by no need for syncing? I have NEVER needed to sync content as extenders don’t do that. they stream directly from the main PC or “server”, because that is basically what your pc running media center is, is a server that the extenders connect to.
I can sort of see the WHS concept, but honestly I am not really sure I’d want tuner cards and other devices in my WHS box, I want my storage solution to be as stable as it can possibly be, and we all know that pc’s with hardware like tuner cards are NOT always 100% stable, there is always something that can happen.
#4 I’d love to run SageTV but I am a sucker for a good looking, easy to use interface, but even with the theme changes I just can’t stand the look and feel of SageTV, Media Center is just too damn purdy ;) but I regress yes the way they did up their extenders is by far the best implementation I have seen to date, they did it right! But also ask yourself this, with all the Video Podcasts and other video sources out there, are you NOT able to find the video you want in a format that will work with the extender you have? I can tell you that I for one, can find everything I need without have to transcode, or change formats.
#5 will be (actually IS) fixed with windows 7, h.264/mpeg4 support is native support in windows 7, also m2ts support is also added so with Windows 7, and extenders you now have native mpeg4 and native m2ts support on the extenders.
#1 and #2 don’t really affect me, not really sure what sooo many peaple get freaked out by #2, becuase BTW DVR-MS and WTV extensions are NOT DRM’d for NTSC and ATSC recordings. That is one of the biggest mis-conceptions SageTV and others have about media center is that ALL recordings are DRM’d and frankly that is NOT true, not one bit. All DVR-MS and WTV are, are containers, like mkv is. They contain meta data as well as the video and surround sound audio file. Also with the updated TV pack, not ALL cable card recordings are DRM’d either. Also who cares of MCE is built into windows, i look at it as a good reason to make it more stable than anything else.
but in the end, what we’re really talking about is that Microsoft doesn’t show off meida center more, and show off its great features and capabilities.
- Josh
Originally posted as a comment by umdivx on GeekTonic by Brent Evans using Disqus.