Windows XP Media Center Edition Review

Harpreet writes "It took 2 months but someone finally published an informative review of the new Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system. AnandTech's review has got everything you could want, including pictures galore. It looks like the folks who make the Linux based Video Disk Recorder have a new standard to live up to." Update: 01/08 21:06 GMT by T : Read on below for a different (Free software, CD-based) approach to computer-A/V integration.

Trunkboy writes "There are a lot of PVR projects out there (Freevo, TiVo, Dave&Dina, etc... but MoviX is a little different. MoviX is an entire distribution (linux of course) that is designed to play avi/mpg/mp3/etc files from a computer. Upgrading is easy, because it boots from a CD! Videos/music can be stored on a local hard drive, or on a network share. This project is incredible, but needs more developers. Stop in and give Roberto a hand -- MoviX shows some great potential!"

Comments

Well

[TerryAtWork]

Let's see how much unwanted DRM they lumber THIS one with...

Re:Well

[Eric Damron]

I don't know who modded the parent down as a troll but DRM is a legitimate concern here.

Re:Well

[greechneb]

I'd have to agree, seeing that xp reports back to home when you do file searches.

You can only imagine what it sends when you record tv....

Re:Well

[haeger]

...and that's why You'll always put a "personal firewall" on Your windows-machines and never let them out unless You specifically tell it to.

I don't trust my win-box farther than I can throw it (which happens to be approximatly 7,5 meters if detached from all cables.)

.haeger

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the following about details on DRM usage within Windows XP Media Center Edition. In most cases no DRM will be used at all. It is the responsibility of the provider to use CGMS-A (copy generation management system/analog) to mark a program for DRM.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_med iacenter_copy.asp

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article you linked later in the thread. While (if it is true, haven't verified it yet) technically what you say is true, your phrase is misleading. When you do a websearch on google, do they not know who (ip address) is searching and what (keywords) is being searched for? How is this any different, besides you are unable to use a proxy to hide who you are? Read your own link, for local searches it does not "report back home" which is what your post implies.

Re:Well

[Jaysyn]

Even my 80 lbs 9 bay case? Thats 80lbs with only a power supply & floppy drive in it mind you. ;)

Jaysyn

Re:Well

[slipgun]

Moderation Totals: Troll=6, Redundant=1, Insightful=4, Interesting=4, Overrated=4, Underrated=5, Total=24.

Wow, the moderators truly are on crack.

Re:Well

[wompser]

Interesting. I think it was modded as redundant (though it was the first post) because it says what everyone was already expecting it to say. I mean, of course the first post on a microsoft media story is going to be anti-MS with reference to any one of the most hated MS practices (insert your favorite: DRM, closed source, monopoly behaviour, Pallidium, clubbing baby seals, etc.)

This says something interesing about the Slashdot mindset: anti-MS statements are considered redundant whether they've already been stated or not. (well Duh!)

Re:Well

[andrewski]

Not a troll. You can only play back recorded video on the computer it was recorded on. Microsoft may announce playback on other devices in the future. For now, it's drm city baby!

Re:Well

[tealover]

Why? Because it will limit the theft of copyrighted materials?

Re:Well

[frozenray]

In my opinion, the problem isn't with moderation, but with metamoderation (M2) as it's implemented today. See my proposal about a new M2 scheme which could remedy some of the problems you mention above here.

Re:Well

[timmyf2371]

No. Because it will limit our fair-use rights protected by law.

Re:Well

[JZ_Tonka]

And what law are these fair-use rights established? Or are these fair use rights established constitutionally?

Or more likely, you're just making these 'laws' up in absence of factual information.

Re:Well

[Narchie Troll]

The U.S. copyright act, silly. 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Re:Well

[Daniel Phillips]

Interesting. I think it was modded as redundant (though it was the first post) because it says what everyone was already expecting it to say.

More likely, it received 11 negative moderations because someone in Redmond has a Perl script that monitors Slashdot and sounds klaxons all over the campus every time the word Microsoft appears in an article.

Re:Well

[Daniel Phillips]

...and that's why You'll always put a "personal firewall" on Your windows-machines and never let them out unless You specifically tell it to.

Putting a firewall on a box that's already running hostile code is a non-starter in terms of security. Remember, Microsoft has complete access to your system, and can do whatever they want to your firewall, including ignoring it completely. You'd be much better off front-ending your XP box with a firewall running on a Linux machine.

Re:Well

[zx-6e]

And Microsoft has never changed thier license "agreements" before? Just because they say they will not use DRM now does not mean they won't automatically enable it with the next service pack.

Trust not Microsoft. In fact, trust no one...

Re:Well

[The Analog Kid]

Well I wonder if it will stop you from copying a cd for back-up purposes, or not play mp3s even though you may own the cd that has that song on it.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a joke, moron.

Re:Well

[Bisifiniti]

Negative, the script is written in VB.

Re:Well

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

No, actually, they can't. First, my windows box isn't "trusted" by my firewall. Two, the first time they ATTEMPT to configure security on my network, there will be an anthill's worth of FBI agents crawing through the Redmond campuses. My firewall isn't running an MS operating system, and they are specifically prohibited from attempting to change its configuration. See: Patriot Act, hacking and cybercrimes section.

Re:Well

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Erm, just noticed you were talking about the "personal firewall" software... the rest of what I said stands though...

Re:Well

[Eric Damron]

.
Piracy is a real problem and I have spoke out vigorously against stealing intellectual property of any kind.

However, DRM destroys our fair use rights as defined under copyright law. It's not good for the consumer. It's being pushed by a Software monopoly that has already been found guilty of breaking antitrust laws and an entertainment cartel that fixes prices and lobbies (bribes) our politicians in order to subvert justice.

Re:Well

[Eric Damron]

You really have never heard of fair use?? Well then, from the copyright law:

107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use38

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include-

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Re:Well

[tealover]

DRM is being pushed by Microsoft? I think you need to take your blinders off. It's being pushed by the music and film industry. Microsoft is trying to do business with those entities.

If you're going to complain about the technology, the least you could do is get informed about the issue rather than trot out tired cliches and toss around silly names ("cartel"...gee, that's creative)

Re:Well

[hany]

It's being pushed by the music and film industry. Microsoft is trying to do business with those entities.

I may agree with you with one aditional note:

Microsoft is trying to make business with music and film industries by helping them to push DRM in exchange for money (mostly share from future income of those industries).

So in the end, it is (almost) same as what Eric Damron stated.

Re:Well

[oliverthered]

Intellectual property is a well known oxymoron, how can I steal something I don't believe in.

Pray tell, coes it's going to take a very long time......... Intellectual property is all in the mind.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to choose between accepting XP spyware and having functional networking: blocking the home calls of applications disables them. More info about this at http://www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft.htm

Re:Well

[JZ_Tonka]

I've read Slashdot for a long time, and even though I probably SHOULD have known this by now, it certainly wouldn't have been the first time that people made up facts to support a shaky viewpoint. Thanks for enlightening me.

Re:Well

[Alsee]

I don't trust my win-box farther than I can throw it (which happens to be approximatly 7,5 meters if detached from all cables.)

Yeah, if the cables are disconnected you can trust it about 7.5 meters. If the cables are still connected you can only trust it a couple of centimeters :)

-

Re:Well

[Alsee]

It is the responsibility of the provider to use CGMS-A (copy generation management system/analog) to mark a program for DRM.

LOL. That's nothing but a "broadcast flag" system.

In most cases no DRM will be used at all.

Bullsht. Once they start using the flag EVERY case will be DRM, except commercials and maybe PBS.

There's no fscking way I'm ever going to buy a DRM-drippled product. Microsoft's claim that they are backing off on using DRM is nothing but a marketing lie.

-

Re:Well

[tealover]

I guess that in the end, it's how you want to look at the issue. I've been telling people for years that the Sony's of the world are a much bigger problem than Microsoft. But since Sony makes popular products, they let them slide.

Blaming Microsoft for the DRM problem is more of the same.

Have fun with your PS2s and WEGAs. You're just funding Sony's effort to control your lives.

Re:Well

[Eric Damron]

Yes, DRM is being pushed by Microsoft and others. Do you find it surprising that I mention the fact? Being that the original article is about a Microsoft product you shouldn't be. As far as criticizing my use of the word "cartel", that's a pathetic debating tactic worthy of a high school student.

cartel - A combination of independent businesses formed to regulate production, pricing and marketing of goods by the members. Yep, seems to be the correct word.

Re:Well

[darien]

Unfortunately for you, the question is whether the judge believes in it.

Re:Well

[cookd]

No. "Fair use" is not a right. "Fair use" is a limitation on the copyright law. You are not guilty of copyright infringement if your use fell under the "Fair use" provision. Unfortunately, that does not mean either of the following:

* That your "fair use" will not be illegal under some other law (i.e. DMCA).

* That the copyright holder has to allow "fair use" if they can prevent it by other means.

Re:Well

[hany]

Have fun with your PS2s and WEGAs. You're just funding Sony's effort to control your lives.

Actualy I have no such things.

And also I'm prety sure I wont have them or alikes.

Maybe only if they give it to me without me paying for it. But that does not mean I'll be using such gifts if the idea will be to sell some content to me. In such case I'll be using it maybe as a bay for some flower or as a source of components or as a training target for my hammer. :)

But I see what you wanted to say. And while I'm prety good at living without VCRs, big TVs, PS2s, a lot of overpriced CDs and DVDs, without going to cinemas to see overpriced and not that "artistics/good/inteligent/..." movies, ..., ..., ... I know that there are people, who are almost addicted to such things and pay a lot of money to manufacturers of such things which in turn supports those manufacturers when they are ploting more or less evil things to enslave more people and enslave them with 'higher "quality" slavery(TM)'.

So while in short term future looks very dark (for me, for you, for others, for all) I still hope that in long term universe will be better. Whether we (people) will be part of that better future, it depends on us. :)

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the jury. Coes I ain't going to pay up on a civial offence.

New standards??

[mustangdavis]

It looks like the folks who make the Linux based Video Disk Recorder have a new standard to live up to."

So what you're saying is that they'll need to get used to writing really buggy software and releasing patches for their software the day it is released ...

Re:New standards??

[alen]

Is Linux any different? It seems like I get an email from redhat at least once a week about a patch for something.

Re:New standards??

[kaosrain]

VDR released an update to their first version to fix problems. Which is better: releasing an update the day the product comes out, or releasing the update later? Either way, the first version of both programs had bugs, and they got fixed. I'm not aware of any programs that were perfect on their first release.

Re:New standards??

[fitten]

A wee bit defensive, are we?

Re:New standards??

[nolife]

Yeah thats the same thing. Like the last one week about Pine being updated? That is Redhat's fault alright.
Comparing these is like apples to oranges.
People seem to forget that most Linux distibutions come with HUNDREDS of "third party" applications that you may or may not have installed. Redhat provides these emails based on your current system profile they have of your system. When is the last time MS put out an alert for an Eudora, PC Pine, Pegasys, or Norton Antivirus update that all run on Windows?

Re:New standards??

[Proc6]

I'm sick of these cheap shots at anything Microsoft, or anything "not" OpenSource I should say.

Yes, my RedHat box has a flashing ! every few days too. Programmers are human last time I checked, and humans come in all varying abilities and disciplines. Not all OpenSource projects are written by l33t ub3r cod3rs, and every closed source shop (like Microsoft) is not a bunch of community college flunkies.

I'll gaurantee you any decent sized company has a whole bunch of programmers just like the average slashdotter (or ARE the average slashdotter), that live to code, love what they do, create elegant routines and would seriously not appreciate anyone saying everything they do is weak, trojan-infested, closed-source satan code, just because they work for a business model that keeps proprietary development private.

Lay off our programmer bretheren.

Re:New standards??

[GutBomb]

he did not say "isn't that like redhat" he said that's like Linux. and he was right. he was not saying that it is redhat's dity to fix the problems. What he is saying is that linux is just as buggy as windows, 3rd party or no, linux is not immune to bugs.

Re:New standards??

[nolife]

The exact statement was:
Is Linux any different? It seems like I get an email from redhat at least once a week about a patch for something.

No OS is immune from bugs, but to compare RH's errata which encompasses the core OS plus hundreds of other applications is two different things. Linux is the kernel. Not Pine, not Apache, not SSH, not Sendmail, not Fetchmail, not Bind etc. RH, Debian, Suse is the Linux kernel with all the other stuff added. I run Linux from scratch from a floppy for my router and I have only been directly effected by 2 published bugs for well over 2 years, neither of which could be exploited because there are no user accounts on it (well root could exploit it but he could also rm -rf the whole thing too). The Linux kernel can be used in many places for many things. To say it is as buggy as Windows XP is flat out WRONG.

Re:New standards??

[Anonymous Coward]

You are gay

MOD UP PARENT as funny

[Anonymous Coward]

... because there is no way this person is promoting a MS product on a NERD site!!!

Re:MS wins again

[Eric Damron]

Oh, I see. You're saying that open source software is never top notch.

Nice troll.

Freevo

[Any_User]

This seems like a push to remove Freevo and the other Tivo-like software out of the market. The only problems with the PVR software your run on your general purpose computer is that other software gets in the way. I would prefer a dedicated machine for PVR usage and another for generalized computing.

Re:Freevo

[good-n-nappy]

OK, my attention span is gone, can someone please tell me how I can get the functionality of a Tivo as cheaply and with as minimal effort as possible. I'm not trying to pick a side on the whole PC vs. set-top appliance issue, I just care about functionality for crying out loud!

I would buy a Tivo, ReplayTV, or UltimateTV but these all require subscriptions (yes, they do now REQUIRE subscriptions). I don't want to pay an additional $10 per month for that. However, I also don't want to take on a whole tech support project just so I can have a PVR.

So maybe my question is - how cheaply can I get a PC and a video I/O card and a remote control - that are all guaranteed to work with any one of the PVR software packages. Can someone give me a quick summary? (Or even better, is there a Tivo clone that doesn't require a subscription?)

Re:Freevo

[Kyaphas]

I don't know....Maybe you have to....CHOOSE! :-)

You either deal with the hassles (and shortcomings) of building a PVR yourself. Or you pay a higher amount to the people who have already done it. Luxury(laziness??) comes at a price.

I was all gung-ho to build my own PVR, then I used a TiVo for a bit. Very very very, easy to use. Got one from ebay for ~$130, put in a 120GB drive for another $100(mail-in rebate), and my girlfriend paid the lifetime subscription fee (the TiVo lives over there, man can she bargain!!) A hair under $500, and about 4 hours total of my time. No contest IMHO. But hey, different strokes and all...

Re:Freevo

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the restrictions that Microsoft has apparently put on this software will more than likely encourage the development of "Freevo"-ware. I don't know if companies like Tivo will be able to compete with Microsoft even on a "level" playing field (doesn't mean that they can't try), but this sort of thing happens all the time in the computer industry. The thing to be really concerned about is a Microsoft-Entertainment Industry alliance that will try to sue and pass legislate against anyone who wants unfettered access to these technologies.

Re:Freevo

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget awkward ugly homebuilt frankenrecorders, how about a well built, ethernet enabled subscription free PVR?

http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/cocoon/CSV- E7 7/index.html

Re:Freevo

[Anonymous Coward]

I would prefer a dedicated machine for PVR usage and another for generalized computing.

Depends on who you are. If you're in the video gaming/web tv/aol crowd, this may be just the thing for you.

Re:Freevo

[bitmason]

IMHO, you can't. You get what you pay for.

You can build a PVR easily enough. If I were doing it I'd probably put an ATI AIW card in a Shuttle SFF PC, toss in a good sound card and have my very own media center. Not sure the best way to integrate a remote control into the mix though you could potentially do something with a Sound Blaster Extigy if you went that route. There are lower cost options as well if you just went with a PCI tuner card.

There are other options, such as software for a PS2.

However, this isn't "TiVO functionality." It's basic PVR functionality. I have an ATI AIW in one of my computers and I can assure you it's nowhere near the functionality of a TiVO which has season passes, lots of conflict resolution capabilities etc. (It also crashes and hangs on a regular basis.) Basically these other approaches are more along the lines of click on a grid and tell the machine to record the program in that time slot.

Re:Freevo

[caino59]

take your translator...

http://shopping.msn.co.jp/softcontent/softconten t. asp?scmId=123

the pictures are in universal language tho ;oP

why doesnt the US get the fun stuff ;o(

Re:Freevo

[agallagh42]

All the current AIW cards from ATI come with an RF remote (Remote Wonder), including the bargain priced AIW 7500.

Re:Freevo

[agallagh42]

How hard is it to make a proper link? I mean, come on, are we geeks or are we geeks?

http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/cocoon/CSV-E7 7/index.html
http://shopping.msn.co.jp/softcontent/softcontent. asp?scmId=123

Re:Freevo

[rtechie]

The short answer is to buy a used Tivo or ReplayTV. You should be able to pick one up on EBay for around $150. Early (2000 series) ReplayTV units DO NOT REQUIRE a subscription of any sort, it's just that the functionality will be severely diminished (only manual recordings).

Assuming you're starting from scratch, there is simply no way you could build a PC with anything close to full PVR capabilities for $150. And make no mistake, any such solution will be kludgy. Assuming you already have a suitable PC I reccomend you go with the ALL IN WONDER RADEON 7500 which comes with pretty much everything you need (including the all-important remote) which I've seen on Pricewatch for as little as $115. Please note that the functionality of the ATI software is considered vastly inferior to that of Tivo or ReplayTV, but comparable to anything else you'd find on a PC. However ATI does have TV listings.

The big problem here is that for full PVR functionality you want the channel guide updates (the TV Guide-like listings) so you can simply click on a show name to record it. That costs money, anyway you slice it. I'm not sure, but I believe that Microsoft is currently picking up the tab for Media Center PCs, but EVERYONE ELSE will expect you to pay around $10 a month. For example, Snapstream currently doesn't have an automated channel guide but in the near future they will be offering a subscription service to get the guide.

There is simply no way out of this at present. In the future, you many be able to download "pirate" guides off the Internet using broadband ReplayTV units or possibly Media Center PCs (depending on how popular Media Center becomes).

Check out MythTV!!!

[brunes69]

The project mentioned in the topic is only for DBS satelite users. For everyone else, check out MythTV. This project is so impressive I cannot even explain all its features here. Just go look at it yourself. It is amazing, does almost everything TiVo does (including interactive electronic program guide), plus is a MAME front end, CD player, image browser, and more. Make sure to check out the screenshots!

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is amazing, does almost everything TiVo does (including interactive electronic program guide), plus is a MAME front end, CD player, image browser, and more.

What about a remote? You mean I have to be in front of my computer to pause, fast forward, change channel, etc?

That would be the major features tivo has over mythtv

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[brunes69]

Ever heard of the LiRC project? Myth fully supports all liRC remotes.

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[Raster Burn]

This Website has some good info on how to build a Myth box. I believe you can also buy one from them if you're lazy :)

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[radish]

lesseee here, no season passes (doh!), no suggestions (doh!), needs a athlon 1800 all to itself (DOH!). Thanks, I think I'll stick with Tivo.

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It has an option to record a show no matter when it shows up or what channel. That close to a season pass. I don't know if you can do new shows only like TiVo.

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[Mike Hicks]

You can do the equivalent of a season pass, and you can restrict the recording of shows in certain ways too. I'm running a MythTV box on a 1GHz Athlon. Not the greatest video quality, but I think the only things I've paid for on the system are some quieter fans and a TV tuner.. I figure it's not a bad deal for $100..

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[ChaosDiscord]

no season passes (doh!), no suggestions (doh!), needs a athlon 1800 all to itself (DOH!). Thanks, I think I'll stick with Tivo.

Actually, MythTV does support season passes. In fact, it gives you more options than a Tivo. check it out. "Record this program whenever it's shown on this channel" is the equivalent of Tivo's Season Pass.

It does lack suggestions. That's a shame, but it's still a work in progress. I can live without them.

It does want an athlon 1800, but you can easily get such a processor for $100. If you're willing to put some work into it you can put together a suitable system for about the same price as a Tivo with lifetime subscription. The resulting system will be more generally capable than a Tivo (web browser, game player, MP3/OGG player, record to CD or DVD, simple video editor (suitable for editing out commercials for personal archival use).

Yes MythTV lags behind Tivo. It looks like the listing information is being screen scraped off a web site. If it gets popular that's going to get shut off. (Fortunately there are pay services they'll be able to switch to.) MythTV is relatively new and under heavy development, so you'll either live with reduced functionality or spend time upgrading. As it matures that will change. To put together a machine to run it on cheaply you'll need to invest alot of your own time. Right now, if you're looking for something that just works out of the box, Tivo is probably the right answer. But MythTV is showing alot of promise for the future. Personally I love my Tivo. However, Tivo is showing signs of becoming consumer hostile. They recently decided to change the terms of the lifetime subscription I already paid for from "paying for guide service" to "paying to use the Tivo at all" and declaring that I'm prohibited from modifying my Tivo (with say the popular extra hard drive). I'm not filled with trust for Tivo's future at this point. I'm glad to know that if Tivo's terms become too onerous, I'll have a Free option to try. If I decide I'd just be interested in hacking on a PVR for the fun of it, a project exists I can start with.

(On an unrelated note, it was a moderately big deal when Tivo made the change to the service agreement, but I haven't been able to turn up any good web summaries of the changes. I was certainly ticked off because I specifically researched the service agreement before deciding to purchase a Tivo and a lifetime subscription. Silly me, I foolishly assumed that the "We can revise this agreement at will" clause would never be used to screw me so hard. I made the mistake that the previous pro-customer attitude and unofficial support for modifications would last. I was clearly wrong. On the up side, it reinforced my belief: any company which has a "we can screw you at will" clause, but promises to never use it will eventually break that promise. The only way to protect yourself is to assume that any contract will be abused to harm you, the consumer, as much as possible. I'm so freaking happy that we get to live in a world were we have to assume everyone is out to get us. Hopefully as more citizens get screwed they'll start demanding fair license agreements. Anyway.... back to the original digression...

Can someone offer a good reference beyond the actual agreement? Ideally a site comparing the original and revised agreements with a little analysis of why the changes are bad for customers.)

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[trix_e]

From the MythTV website:

What it does:
*Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
*[lots of other really cool stuff]

hmmm... that IS a cool feature...Fast Forward live TV.

I'd think the box would pay for itself in a matter of days, I'll just watch CNBC and keep my Ameritrade account open and ready to go.

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[nhavar]

WinLIRC and Girder also are available remote control products and can work with many remotes and IR devices.

I am using Girder now (Girder and LIRC/WinLIRC can also work in concert). I have girder on WinXP Pro using an ATI AIW128pro hooked to my living room TV. I built a $9.00 IR receiver (parts all from RadioShack) so that I could use my One-for-all programmable/learning/pc programable remote to play DVD/CD/Winamp without needing to touch the wireless kb/mouse.

The setup is pretty painless, I can schedule shows or use a transmitter to send DVD broadcasts to my kids' or wife's room, if someone is watching something else on the TV. I can watch something on cable, record something on the PC, and record something else on the VCR if need be. The One-for-all is a great remote for the price and has good punch through and macro features so I don't have to do alot of key mashing just to watch a DVD or play the VCR (i.e. First turn off the cable then hit VCR then change to channel 00 then hit tv/vcr then hit DVD then power then play - JUST HIT MACRO1). After I get the IR transmitter built I won't have to use the MACRO1 button GIRDER or LIRC will take care of manipulating the VCR/CableBox.

The other nice thing about this setup is that I can watch TV while someone else plays a game on the PC or browses the net(with the headphones on). Unfortunately if I want to use the "live TV mode" of the computer it has to be free from other users.

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[JohnFluxx]

I've had mythtv installed for a week now, and love it. The best feature is that even though I haven't been on my computer for 2 weeks, but use the web interface to scan for tv shows and mark them to record. It automatically records futurama and simpsons daily for me. I then reencode them as mpeg4, scp them to the machine I'm currently on, and watch them from there :)

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[radish]

I'm interested in what you say re: the service agreement. I'm in the UK and we've had no notice of any changes to our agreements, and certainly no word that mods are no longer "allowed". In fact on the Tivo UK forum we have a company rep who shows up every so often and basically says "not change, do what you wanna" - even though 80% of the posts are about one kind of mod or another.

Oh well, we're still on series 1 Tivos anyway, and there's nothing easier than a quick mfstools disk upgrade and plug in TurboNet :)

If you could point to a web version of the new agreement or anything it would be useful...may be a taste of what's to come for us.

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[zsmooth]

For $200 you could have the real thing.

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[ibbey]

I own a Tivo, and am building a MythTV box (though I'll probably switch to Freevo once it's a little more mature). Some things you can't do on Tivo that you can (or will be able to soon) on Myth:

• Two (or more) tuners
  
• Archive to CD or DVD
  
• Play DVD's
  
• Watch recorded programs in any room in the house *
  
• Browse the web**
  
• Send & recieve email**
  
• Schedule recordings from the internet-- potentially even by phone.
  
• More...
  

My MythTV box will probably end up costing me about $800, but that's only because I bought pretty much top-of-the-line gear, and am overbuilding quite a bit. One could easily build a fast, two-tuner MythTV box for $500, assuming they are buying everything-- if you already have some of the components, you can knock quite a bit off that. Keep in mind, this price is for a fast (~2100+ Athlon) two-tuner unit- you can record two seperate programs while at the same time watching a recording. This is not possible on any current Tivo, with the exception of the DirecTivo-- which of course locks you into DirecTV. If you don't want to be able to do all that at once, or if you are willing to sacrifice some picture quality, you can easily get by with slower computer. There are several people happily running MythTV on 700Mhz or slower machines.

Now, there are still some disadvantages. Mainly, the software is still considerably less userfriendly then Tivo. But that should improve greatly over time. Considering that the project has only been around since April 2002, I think any lack of friendliness can be forgiven.

Finally, building your own system has the additional value of being, well, your own. Sure Tivo is great. I still tell everyone I talk to about it to buy one. But personally, I'll be very happy when the day comes that I can ditch the Tivo for my own, homebrewed system.

* Requires a computer with a TV out card-- doesn't need to be fast, though.

** Granted, a TV is not the best internet environment, but for many people, this would be handy.

Re:Check out MythTV!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you just want WebTV.

Of course

[nrvous6]

Expect Service Pack 1 sometime in 2006...

Re:Of course

[ThrasherTT]

Don't you mean Service Pack 42? I mean, damn... three years and only one SP?

Re:Of course

[nrvous6]

There will be many unseen delays, or unfinished additions, like the ability of your M$ Media Center PC to only work with you M$-enabled television and DVD's which must have M$-signed certificate so that you make sure that your system is compliant...

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually service pack one (for xp) is installed already on media center pc's.. it's required for some of the functionality to work properly..

Oh.. you mean that was supposed to be a joke...

Re:Of course

[VoiceOfRaisin]

Of course (Score:3, Funny)
by nrvous6 (590059)
Expect Service Pack 1 sometime in 2006...

Re:Of course (Score:4, Funny)
by ThrasherTT (87841)
Don't you mean Service Pack 42? I mean, damn... three years and only one SP?

wow, complete opposite trolls, but both get modded up as funny. so which is it. they dont update enough, or they update too much? seems as tho making any joke about microsoft, true or not, gets you modded up as funny here.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

expect service pack!
+5 funny

Standards?

[grub]

It looks like the folks who make the Linux based Video Disk Recorder have a new standard to live up to.

Yes, the Linux VDR people will have to figure out how to hide spyware in their (open) source code.

Re:Standards?

[Scyber]

Yep, I was using one at bestbuy a few months ago and in order to download guide data you had to agree to some sort of ad tracking.

Re:Standards?

[Klerck]

Actually it wouldn't be that hard. Someone could theoretically do it pretty easily with an application such as this by claiming that that part of the application decrypted video or something along the lines of that and that releasing the source could cause legal complications under the DMCA. A company like Transgaming could already be doing this in the closed source part of their program that deals with copy protection, for example.

Re:Standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Trojan" is the open source word for "spyware". But security doesn't tend to be a big priority among the "windows got it? me too" open source projects.

Haven't read the article yet but I would say...

[Trolling4Dollars]

... these are still more Apples-to-Apples with XP than the Linux Video Disk Recorder:

MythTV
Freevo

Check it out!

Some things are better left off the computer

[FortKnox]

I have a TiVo.
I use a TiVo instead of piping my cable through my computer for a reason.
Its the same reason I have a football games on my GameCube.

Some things are just better without the PC.
Why would I use awkward PVR abilities of my PC (requiring me to sit in a specific spot, and use a mouse) when I can plop down on my couch and pick up the TiVo remote?
There's a reason speciliazed components sell better than PC software geared to do the same thing.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[notque]

I agree. For some reason football games just are not the same on PC.

Then again, strategy games are never the same on console.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[Incorrigible]

Why would you use the command line, when you could use a point-and-click GUI?

Answer:
Power, flexibility and speed.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[Any_User]

Right, let the Unix mantra of make one tool to do one thing well apply here.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[angle_slam]

Why would I use awkward PVR abilities of my PC (requiring me to sit in a specific spot, and use a mouse) when I can plop down on my couch and pick up the TiVo remote?

As the article notes, there is a remote available for the MCE PC. There are also 3rd party remotes available if you want to build your own home theater PC.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[KDan]

I agree. The purpose of a PVR is simple and clear, and doesn't require all the complexity (and expense!) of a PC to manage.

They would have done better to design a simple set-top box that you put on your TV and has all the fancy interfaces on the TV screen and the remote and all that, and which records the shows on an internal hard drive which is then accessible from your PC (through a Firewire, USB2, or even an ethernet cable), so that you can download/manage the files from your PC (which is good at that).

Why buy a whole PC and leave it sitting next to your TV, afraid to use it for other things (like playing that LAN game of UT2003 when friends come round!) because then it might crash or somehow fail to record the show you wanted recorded??

Daniel

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[LoudMusic]

Did you read the article? No mouse required. And this isn't inteded to be on your workstation. It's intended to be used with a computer sitting next to your television/AV Receiver.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention another good reason: PCs make a lot of noise. I'd rather be listening to the TV when I'm watching, rather than the whine of hard drives: Tivos are generally fairly quiet.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[angle_slam]

Also, you can upgrade the space to your PC a lot easier than upgrading the space to your TiVO (which can't be upgraded without voiding the warranty and can only hold 2 hard drives anyway.) You can stick 8 200 GB hard drives into many cases (though probably not the HP they tested). Having the time to watch 1600 GB of stored TV shows is another matter.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[NetJunkie]

It is meant as a whole PC. They cost a lot. I could buy a lot of TiVos for the price of one, AND pay for the service. The commercials promote them as a PC and a PVR.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[Eric Damron]

That is exactly why I didn't agree with Microsoft when they said that video streaming was going to power the next generation of PCs. Why would I want to sit at my PC for a couple of hours and watch a movie on my monitor??

Lots of people have entertainment centers that allow the whole family to be comfortable while watching movies. I just can't see my family croweded around my PC watching "The Two Towers."

Oh well, to each his own I guess.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[Scyber]

But for the price of the Media Center PC you can buy 2 set-top PVRs with activation/service. And as a PVR owner two tuners is much better than unlimited space.

Plus w/ replayTV you can just use DVarchive (http://dvarchive.sourceforge.net/) to offload your shows to your PC and stream them back to your replaytv whenever you want.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[nolife]

I found a good alternative you might enjoy..

It comes with a 19 inch screen, a magnetic flying head audio/video recorder that has no DRM restrictions, the recordable media is extremely cheap and available everywhere, it is compatible with thousands of other already existing units, a remote control, plugs into standard cable jacks and accepts input from external sources, has a 125 channel cable ready tuner, plays DVD's, MP3's and media from CDRW's, it is self contained and can be used anywhere a 120/240 outlet is..
Sounds like a good but for only $297

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[drgnbear]

TiVO is a computer. It's a PowerPC with a custom Unix OS...

and PS I have a WMCPC a home and I never touch the mouse or the keyboard....

I can plug in a firewire harddrive and expand my programming space with no effort at all...

I can play all my music files of my server and view my pictures and videos on my TV.

Hands down Windows Media Center wins...

TiVo is dead to me.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think MS already tried the set-top-box formula for success with "UltimateTV", but it just faded into the background as Tivo took over the market. How quickly people forget...

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[geekoid]

PCs are cheap, and easy to upgrade. You do not need a 1000 dollar PC to make a pvr. You can do it much cheaper, with more feature(if you desire) and use different media to save you shows.Want to save it to Digital tape? no problem, cdr? no problem.

You don't have to worry about spyware telling somebody what shows you recorded, and then having it tell someone everytime you watch it.

Those are the advantages of using a computer. as far as asthetics, get a case that matches your entertainment center.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[geigertube]

"Why would I use awkward PVR abilities of my PC (requiring me to sit in a specific spot, and use a mouse) when I can plop down on my couch and pick up the TiVo remote?"

Did you read the article? Windows Media Center comes with a remote.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[CormacJ]

Actually you can now hold four drives in a tivo:

http://www.9thtee.com/tivoquaddrive.htm

The upgrade process on a tivo has been mainstreamed enough that upgrading your tivo drive is a pretty easy job.

The main difference between MCE and Tivo is that on MCE a 93gb disk gets you 5 hours and change of recording at best. A 40gb Tivo gets you the same amount of time, so until Micro$oft stops using a bloated encoding system you're not getting value for your disk space.

Personally, I still wouldn't trust MCE as my primary PVR. I don't want something that can be that flaky when recording stuff I want to watch.

My Tivo does a wonderful job for that, and in 3 years my Tivo has never crashed. This is where you want to spend money: Linux is designed to remain up for infinite periods of time, and that has always been an issue that Microsoft has been weak on. You can make MS platforms reliable if you are willing to take the time and devote energy to it. I know, I manage a large mix of MS and Linux platforms. My linux platforms have always been "install and mostly forget" servers. All I do it keep them updated and tidy up sometimes. My MS platforms need babying, they are always finding a different way to require attention, and when MS needs attention *everything* stops until you fix it.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[Anonymous Custard]

Why would I want to sit at my PC for a couple of hours and watch a movie on my monitor??

If all you want is a DVD player, then buy a DVD player; the Media Center PC probably isn't for you. But if you want a Super PVR, then get the PC.

For families, I think the idea is that you could hook this up to your living room TV and stereo system, and it becomes an expandable, multi-function, Super TiVo, PLUS it's a state-of-the-art computer when you want it to be.

For college dorms or small apartments, you probably wouldn't have a TV much larger that a 19 or 21 inch computer monitor anyway. I watched DVD movies all the time on my 19" Samsung 955DF and ATI All-In-Wonder card in my college dorm, and it was excellent. Heck, I also had an old 13" hitachi TV on the other side of the room, and would watch two shows at once sometimes.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[Zathrus]

you can upgrade the space to your PC a lot easier than upgrading the space to your TiVO

Not really. If you're competent enough to add a new HD to a PC, you're competent enough to add one to a TiVo. It requires a bit more work, yes, but so what? It requires a lot less work to actually use the thing, which is the whole point. Not to swap components out hourly.

can't be upgraded without voiding the warranty

DirecTiVo's have no such limitation (at least not the Series2's, and I don't think the S1's did either). There's no sticker saying "opening voids warrantee" or any such thing. Besides which, it's a 90 day parts warrantee anyway.

And while, yes, you can stick an absurd amount of disk space in a standard PC, what's the point? I have 110 GB on my TiVo and I've never even come close to filling it.

Maybe if it handled MP3/OGG/FLAC/whatever as well it would be an issue, or if it could do HD, but TiVo doesn't. For what TiVo does do, no HTPC comes even close.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[scenic]

Well, you're right about some things. To bring this back a bit more on topic, if you choose XP Media Center, then you may be wrong. This is from the article:

There are a lot of improvements that must be made in order for MCE to really take off however; first and foremost, the performance issues we encountered are unacceptable. Unfortunately, it may take mainstream Hyper-Threading enabled Pentium 4s with an 800MHz FSB in order to mask the stuttering issues that occur during normal use of MCE as a PVR. As far as stability goes, we'd expect the limited number of hardware vendors to more thoroughly stress test and ensure their machines won't be crashing in a media center environment; like we've mentioned before, who wants to explain why their TV just blue screened?

You may really need a big ass expensive machine to do this right. Also, one other concern that they didn't address is sound. When my Tivo is recording and the room is silent, I can barely pick up the hard drive writing sounds. No fan, no other hum, nothing. Would you really expect that from a PC? I used to have a server in the room with dual CPUs and 3 hard drive (one SCSI monster) which made my room sound like you were in a car on the highway. Even after removing SCSI drive and one IDE drive, and otherwise altering the fans, it's still too loud for the living room.

My point is just that having a PC vs. having an appliance involves more than just upgradeability. One of the reasons that modifying an appliance should void a warranty is that Tivo or ReplayTV can make assumptions about cooling, noise, and ventilation based on their tests on fixed hardware. You throw those out the window if you decide to put a 10000 RPM drive into your Tivo.

Also, aesthetically, the HP they used didn't really look like it belongs in my entertainment center... it's vertically oriented, has a keyboard (!!!), and it otherwise annoying.

Anyway, I guess if you have a spare PC or lots of money and want to get upgradeability in a familiar setup, go for it. I'd rather stick with my Tivo, with it's known privacy issues and have a quiet living room with low power consumption. I can see a place for both, and I'm sure people will buy the one that makes the most sense for them.

Sujal

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[daviddennis]

While it's true that they have a remote, I'm not sure how useful it would be with the typical monitor I see attached to a PC.

And the trend is undeniably towards more immersive viewing experiences (i.e. 60 inch plasma screens, etc).

I didn't notice anything about the monitor in the Media Center PC spec, but I'll bet most of these systems have standard 15 or 17" monitors, and most people using them are watching TV from an office chair.

There's nothing wrong with that per se, but I would think a remote control would be next to useless -- and the first thing a buyer would lose.

What you really need to make this concept work is a true HDTV monitor. Unfortunately, at about $5,000-odd, that's not cheap, even compared to the price of this system.

D

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[shyster]

I have a TiVo. I use a TiVo instead of piping my cable through my computer for a reason. Its the same reason I have a football games on my GameCube. Some things are just better without the PC. Why would I use awkward PVR abilities of my PC (requiring me to sit in a specific spot, and use a mouse) when I can plop down on my couch and pick up the TiVo remote?

Did you not read the article and decide to comment anyway (like this guy, who at least made a valid point)? Or are you Reading Comprehension Challenged? Either way, surely you've noticed the variety of remote control hardware and software available for PC's now? Not to mention that the XP MCE PC reviewed comes with a (preinstalled even!) remote? And, there's always ATI's Remote Wonder to work with your AIW card, so you can sit on your couch and control your PC in another room. And of course, the XP MCE (as mentioned in the article, is targeted towards being either in your living room or your TV and PC combined (for smaller spaces)p>

There's a reason speciliazed components sell better than PC software geared to do the same thing.

Yeah, but I always thought it was a matter of stability and ease of setup, and sometimes even quality...but maybe it's more consumer ignorance, which you might want to look into becoming the poster child of.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[shyster]

The purpose of a PVR is simple and clear, and doesn't require all the complexity (and expense!) of a PC to manage.

A PVR's purpose is clear, and as demonstrated, MS has done a decent job of getting that part down. Of course, MS is trying to build a Media Center, of which PVR functionality is only one part. It's the most visible part because of the success of TiVO and the like, but MS isn't stopping there (like TiVo and ReplayTV do).

Already, XP MCE adds support for a host of other video and audio files, and can continue to add support for other or newer formats (that's the beauty of a PC, it can be taught to do new things with software).

I'd expect some video editing programs to be released that can edit MS's bastardized MPEG-2 content Real Soon, and a way to convert them to DivX as well (commercial or otherwise). MS may even see the light and drop the format all together.

You can easily archive content to removable storage, or add internal or external drives for archiving (will your TiVO burn DVD's?).

Indexing and searching are a natural addition, as is streaming to other "receivers" (PC's with MCE Client software for AV decoding connected to other TV's) around the network.

Make no mistake, MS isn't building a PVR. MS is testing the waters for a MS Digital Media Server in your home. It's classic MS...throw together existing components, wrap it up in a pretty GUI, and release v1.0. Figure out the bugs and add a few small features and release SP1. Then, if it sticks, run with it and add feature after feature until it's too bloated and cumbersome to take any more. If it doesn't stick, shelve it and write it off.

My prediction: It won't stick...not right now. But it'll be back (whether from MS or someone else) in about 3-5 years, and it'll be a pretty profitable market to be in.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[angle_slam]

While it's true that they have a remote, I'm not sure how useful it would be with the typical monitor I see attached to a PC.

There's nothing preventing you from attaching a PC to a television. In fact, many of today's video cards have s-video outputs. Plus, many projectors have VGA or DVI inputs and there are also devices that convert VGA to component inputs (such as this one.) In fact, the entire premise of the HTPC (Home theater PC) is that the PC is actually better than a standalone DVD player, because of the availability of scalers and custom resolutions. Not to mention the fact that it can also serve as an MP3 jukebox. Check out the HTPC FAQ. (Not to mention the fact that it is generally easier to get a region-free DVD-ROM drive than a region-free standalone DVD.)

Of course, Windows XP MCE is not necessary to play DVDs or to record tv shows, despite what MS would want you to think.

Off topic: Despite recent jokes about fancy computer cases, HTPC is a growing niche market and people want fancy computer cases (such as this Coolermaster case) because they want to put their PC with their receiver and other HT equipment.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[tricops]

Integrated electronics like that are great for their simplicity, but if something in it fails then it's not so great.

I worked in a dept. store a long time ago, and the combo tv/vcrs used to come back all the time.
Usually, if they came back once, they ended up coming back for repairs multiple following times as well.
Of course, this was for Wards before they went under and the DFW repair center didn't seem to ever
bother doing a very exceptional job, so YMMV.

At least with a homebuilt PVR you could just swap out a part if it decides to die on you.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[angle_slam]

And while, yes, you can stick an absurd amount of disk space in a standard PC, what's the point? I have 110 GB on my TiVo and I've never even come close to filling it. Maybe if it handled MP3/OGG/FLAC/whatever as well it would be an issue, or if it could do HD, but TiVo doesn't. For what TiVo does do, no HTPC comes even close.

So you don't think a PC can handle MP3 files? Ever hear of Winamp (just to name one of dozens of MP3 players available for PCs.). As for HD, yes a PC can handle HD. Maybe not the Win XP MCE, but how about this? (I don't know if PVR capabilities for HD are ready yet with that product, but PVR capabilities are available with this one.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[angle_slam]

(I don't know if PVR capabilities for HD are ready yet with that product, but PVR capabilities are available with this one.)

Whoops, there should have been a link to AccessDTV HDTV decoder, which does have PVR capabilities. What was it someone was saying about no HTPC coming close to TiVo?

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[Zathrus]

You don't get it. Yes, a HTPC can do more, but it doesn't do it as well. Nothing on the home built front comes close to the usability or features of a TiVo within the PVR realm. Sure, you can build one that does other stuff, and that's a valid thing, but every solution out there is kludgy and inelegant.

Of course, if you'd bothered to read some of my past comments you would've noted that I recommend AVSforum for HTPC needs, and that they've been doing HDTV time shifting for two years now. I know quite well of what I speak.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[nolife]

Actually I was just trying to be funny with the combo deal but you are correct about the consolidation. I've seen quite a few people loose their fax, printer, scanner and copier when those all in one deals crap out..

I actually have a portable VCR/TV combo but the convienence factor outweighs the potential failure for what I use it for.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[demon]

Hm. Microsoft tried to make their own set top box. It failed. Perhaps you've heard of it. It was called UltimateTV?

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[Saint Fnordius]

It gets even more interesting. Remember Apple's "Digital Hub" strategy? Well, TiVo is now officialy a member, with Rendezvous support promised in the documents!

This is different than Microsoft's strategy, as Apple is positioning its machines as the traffic controller, helping disparate devices exchange the relevant data. How about dumping your faves from TiVo onto your iMac and burning your own archive DVDs? How about a video iPod that can take your TiVo's recordings on the road? Or pictures from your digital camera into a TiVo album/slide show?

Not interesting enough? Well, Apple's opened the source of Rendevous, and has no qualms about allowing a Linux adaptation of it! Apparently they want to compete on the basis of their hardware/software integration again, not just on lockout.

So now we have two opposing philosophies: Microsoft's "embrace and extend", and Apple's "digital hub". One wants to take over the whole show, the other wants to connect and choreograph.

Re:Some things are better left off the computer

[DaytonCIM]

As the article notes, there is a remote available for the MCE PC. There are also 3rd party remotes available if you want to build your own home theater PC.

That's all fine and dandy, but my computer is not in my living room (where my TV is). IMO Tivo is still better.

MSFT marches on....

[Giant Ape Skeleton]

This is just further evidence that any technological convergence is by necessity, first and foremost, a marketing convergence.

------

Re:MSFT marches on....

[Anonymous Coward]

U 1s t3h stpu1d!!! U sux0rz, I r0x0rz!!! Buzzw0rd sp3w1ng fr33k!!!

H@x0rz 4 3VAR!!!

Anand also wrote about MCE in

[joeflies]

Computer Power User this month. Covered the HP with the emuzed card in particular

No so fast there

[Jack Wagner]

I don't have the time to read the article but I'm guessing it has several flaws:

1) You are limited by the fact that this thing is built on legacy hardware, by the time it hits the stores you would be able to build one with better performance and much better specs.

2) I don't care for the activation aspect and think that most users will rebel against it. It's one thing to be forced to activate a PC OS, but an entertainment OS???? No thanks

3) The sound on this is going to be sub-optimal simply due to the limited bus speeds used by their analog to digital decoder.

4) As the article porbably states the price will be the major stumbling point, these are going to have to meet the typical "Best Buy" buyers price point and at their outrageous starting point they are way way over the top

5) Where is the USB2?? serial ATA66?? WiFi??? 802.11b??? Bluetooth??? I need to plug my other musica devices (iPod anyone) into this and make them work, lacking these things just don't cut it.

To summarize, no thanks.

Re:No so fast there

[frankthechicken]

I don't have the time to read the article but I'm guessing it has several flaws

Ah yes, the typical consulting way of doing things, making a decision before knowing any facts.

Re:No so fast there

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you ever do any work with Steve Woston?

What has that daft bugger been up to lately?

Re:No so fast there

[Petronius]

I don't have time to read your post but I'm guessing it has the following flaws:
- bla bla bla
- bla bla bla
- I have an iPod
- bla bla bla
- Microsoft sucks!
- bla bla bla
Suckers!

Re:No so fast there

[ignipotentis]

First, don't bash anything untill you read about it and understand it.

Second, and yes, this is pricey, but if your looking for a media PC, this will do the trick, and you shouldn't have trouble hooking up your ipod or any other media device to it.

Alien Ware Media Center PC

Third, You didn't mention it but others did, this is extremely hardware limited, ATI can't even get on because their cards don't do all the encoding in hardware. You also must have a remote so the lazy people can operate this from their couch.

Finally, I know anytime MS is mentioned, it will get torn apart. And i know this has DRM in it, but it will only be months before that is broken. In all honesty, XP is alot better than their previous efforts, RIAA and MPAA ass kissing aside. So lets drop the nothing from MS will ever be good enough, because we all know that the majority of people that use Slashdot are browsing from IE.

Re:No so fast there

[Eric Damron]

"I don't have the time to read the article but I'm guessing it has several flaws:"
.
.
.

"Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time"

If you want to get it right the first time as your sig states, I would suggest _taking_ the time to read the article before commenting....

Just a suggestion

Re:No so fast there

[paganizer]

Hmm.
Mod +3 Vorpal

Re:No so fast there

[dprice]

yes, this is pricey, but if your looking for a media PC, this will do the trick, and you shouldn't have trouble hooking up your ipod or any other media device to it. Alien Ware Media Center PC

That Alienware box looks suspiciously like the Shuttle barebone PCs which you can buy at newegg.com for less than $400. Do-it-yourselfers could save more than a few bucks making these into an equivalent media PC.

Re:No so fast there

[Anonymous Custard]

... which you can buy at newegg.com [newegg.com] for less than $400. Do-it-yourselfers could save more than a few bucks making these into an equivalent media PC.

No they couldn't; at least, not until MS makes WinMCE available as a separate purchase. Currently you can get teh OS if it's pre-installed on an approved Media Center PC.

Re:No so fast there

[Keith Russell]

Wow. Where do I start? Oh, yeah:

I don't have the time to read the article but I'm guessing it has several flaws:

Not exactly striking from a position of strength, are you?

2) I don't care for the activation aspect and think that most users will rebel against it. It's one thing to be forced to activate a PC OS, but an entertainment OS???? No thanks

XP's WPA is rotten just on principle. But I don't see why MCE would be exempt. Home and Pro can do everything MCE does, with the right kit. All MCE does is put a shiny face on it all.

1) You are limited by the fact that this thing is built on legacy hardware, by the time it hits the stores you would be able to build one with better performance and much better specs.

What? Take a current, standard issue Fiorina-Capellas Presario, add a tuner card, IR remote, and memory card reader, and wrap it in a lacquer finish case, and suddenly it's "legacy hardware"? You make it sound like it's a 286 with a VLB graphics card. And it already has hit the stores. I started seeing them at my local Best Buy in November.

5) Where is the USB2?? serial ATA66?? WiFi??? 802.11b??? Bluetooth??? I need to plug my other musica devices (iPod anyone) into this and make them work, lacking these things just don't cut it.

How could a 286 support all that? :-) SerialATA is just starting to penetrate the high end of the market, so I'm not surprised by it's omission on the HP. Besides, putting hard to find hard drives in a consumer grade PC isn't very user friendly. Bluetooth, cool as it is, doesn't have an obvious application in a Media Center PC except wireless keyboards and mice. You can get those now without Bluetooth, so what's the point? A best-case 11 Mbps won't give users a good impression of 802.11b. I don't think WiFi will be truly useful on a media center PC until 802.11g hits the mainstream. And HP's models include both USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394, so your iPod will work just fine.

3) The sound on this is going to be sub-optimal simply due to the limited bus speeds used by their analog to digital decoder.

Buzzword Bingo! You have no idea what sound card it is, let alone how it works. You're trying to BS the wrong crowd, buddy. Oh, for the record, it's a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy in the HP. They even have a bundle that includes a set of Klipsch ProMedia 5.1 speakers.

4) As the article porbably states the price will be the major stumbling point, these are going to have to meet the typical "Best Buy" buyers price point and at their outrageous starting point they are way way over the top

Ah, now for the coup de grace. It's too expensive to begin with, but the feature list is missing a whole bunch of esoteric bullet points! Price is relative to an individual's financial situation, so I'll just post the prices, and leave you to determine their worth. An entry level HP is $1349. The loaded model, with higher-spec core components and (expensive) Klipsch speakers, is $1999. Sony's nearest match is the the Vaio RZ, which uses their home-brewed GigaPocket software instead of XP MCE, and includes a DVD burner on all models. It starts at $1599. (Note: all prices are from hp.com and sonystyle.com, which were both advertising sale and/or rebate pricing. Display not inlcuded.)

Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time

Let's see how many sarcastic uses of the phrase "ringing endorsement" this generates. Hey, is Bernie Schiffman hiring?

Re:No so fast there

[dWhisper]

XP's WPA is rotten just on principle. But I don't see why MCE would be exempt. Home and Pro can do everything MCE does, with the right kit. All MCE does is put a shiny face on it all.

I would not say rotten. Annoying, but honestly, given the number of pirated copies of their OS's out there, I understand why they did it. I'll omit any arguements for or against, but any business, even one with their income, would notice when over half of their users are not paying for their product.

MCE is just XP Pro with the Media Center Application. I do tech support for such a machine, was in the training classes and have had a lot of time to work with it. And no, you can't get what it does through a standard application, since essentially, it moves that remote to the forefront. I've had a TV card with a remote, and it's mostly just a glorified on/off button. The integration of recording and the scheduling setup makes this closer to a TiVo immitator (though nearly featureless). It also ties in the whole "My (Everything" folders into a browser you can use that remote for. The problems with it are in the recording format and that the Remote is used only in the Media Center Application.

Don't omit Gateway's Media Center PC from the list, and all of them are not in a price point for the Best Buy market. Having done my stint in computer sales there, I know. People ask you everytime a $400 eMachine or HP is in the ad "Is this a good computer?" It's hard to lie to them, and you want to say, no, it's a piece of crap. But you can't, you can tell them something like "There's a reason most computers cost $1000 or more."

Microsoft is not going after the Major home users on this, that's why MCE isn't an upgrade option. It's for Tech-savy, and for people that like toys. MCE is a slick toy to play with (though I'd say if you have TiVo, stick with TiVo), but it's also something that can be bundled with other options. Gateway has one with a Plasma TV, for example.

The other factor to consider is that there is a limited amount of Hardware supported in the configuration (the Video Card, TV Card, and Sound Card options are all limited). On the other side, having used the PC, for a Windows System, it's stable, and should something break in the Media Center component, it's very easy to fix.

Lack of ATI support

[dewboy]

The article states that "the vast majority of TV tuner cards available will not work" -- and this includes all ATI All-In-Wonder cards. The only two cards supported are the Hauppauge WinTV PVR and the Emuzed Maui PCI PVR.

Personally, I think I'll stick with my ATI card and Video Disk Recorder.

Re:Lack of ATI support

[delus10n0]

Sorry, but your ATI doesn't do hardware MPEG2 encoding/decoding-- while a WinTV PVR or Emuzed Maui PVR will.

A hardware MPEG2 encoding/decoding board is what is needed for the Media Center OS.

Very Indepth.

[notque]

The guide is very well written, and easy to understand.

Can Linux run something like this?

I have Linux installed on a pc, and I will use linux for a year straight, never touching windows until a few programs make me deal with the obtruse nature, and all the spyware, lock ups, and virtual memory sky rocketing my pc to a hault.

If it wasn't for Civ 3 PTW, I would never run windows, and I think that is how a lot of people are.

This is something I would gladly spend the extra money on, but do you have to use windows for all these functions.

(I have never actually payed attention to what comes out in the way of viewing television, recording it, and so on. If the options that are in the Windows verision are in a linux version, if any, that would definately be something to setup.)

Re:Very Indepth.

[blahlemon]

Silly rabbit, Microsoft is for kids!

Civ 3 PTW now brought to you by the nice people at http://www.transgaming.com

direct link

[eldimo]

Direct link to article without ads

Want to know why it took that long?

[Chris_Stankowitz]

"It took 2 months but someone finally published an informative review of the new Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system."

I took me that long to get it installed.

Re:Want to know why it took that long?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's actually not surprising, since it is only available as a preinstalled custom OS.
The OEM customizes it for their hardware.

Re:Want to know why it took that long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because I'm sure many people are going to buy a $2,000 TV and then decline the EULA for the very features they paid that money for.

An unstoppable marketing blitz....

[mao che minh]

Microsoft should get Ellen Fiess and Steve the "Dude" guy of Dell fame to market this 'innovative' (heh) new technology. Could you imagine how amazing that marketing campaign would be?

Re:An unstoppable marketing blitz....

[stratjakt]

The "dude" guy is gone.

Now its the interns who listen to the Dell employees say "We build a custom PC just for you" and they stand there TAKING NOTES!

Re:An unstoppable marketing blitz....

[blahlemon]

Not entirely true...

The other day they delivered a system to the Dude.

Re:An unstoppable marketing blitz....

[stratjakt]

I wanna be a Dell intern.

*... taking notes ...*
*... taking notes ...*
*... taking notes ...*
Dude, how do you spell 'PC'?

Re:An unstoppable marketing blitz....

[Anonymous Coward]

They might get the Dell dude, but Ellen Feiss uses a Mac, and TiVo just announced a FireWire-compatible TiVo that plays iTunes playlists off of a Mac. She's gonna be a tough one. Then again, if the price is right...

Re:An unstoppable marketing blitz....

[pi_rules]

...and Steve the "Dude" guy of Dell fame to market this 'innovative' (heh) new technology. Could you imagine how amazing that marketing campaign would be?

Yeah.

Dude, you're getting screwed...

First thing that pops into my head ...

[JSkills]

Regardless of how intuitive the user interface or feature rich the application itself is, can anyone imagine running a media server in your home using an M$ OS? I just can't. My Tivos are Linux based. Recording TV / movies is important!

Maybe I'm biased due to my years of favorable experiences with Linux supporting millions-of-pageviews-per-day websites or mission critical ecommerce applications that simply can never be down, but I can just picture my kids crying "Daddy we want to watch Tom and Jerry" as I struggle to reboot the machine and wait through what always seems like an eternity when starting any M$ OS.

Re:First thing that pops into my head ...

[stratjakt]

I built my 7 year old a PC, it sits in her room and runs Windows XP home.

I checked it the other day when I brought her some new games, it has about 2 months uptime, and she plays with it all the time.

Now, if my 7 year old can run Windows without having to reboot, why can't you?

Because your a linux troll, maybe?

Frankly I'd want the MS OS for the ability to play games on the big screen. And tux racer is not a game, it's a joke.

Re:First thing that pops into my head ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry for your daughter - with a dad so willing to waste his money while contributing to the expansion of a criminal company.

Re:First thing that pops into my head ...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I'll bite...

"can anyone imagine running a media server in your home using an M$ OS?"

Besides the fact that the "M$" spelling should automatically earn a -1 Troll rating, you cite absolutely no reason why people would not be inclined to use this device, save that it runs on a Microsoft OS. I don't think you are biased, but you conveniently substitute popular anti-Microsoft rhetoric in the absence of a real argument.

Most Microsoft applications are designed with the lowest common denominator in mind, and most people are rather happy with that. If you happen to fall below that line, how is that Microsoft's fault?

"I struggle to reboot the machine and wait through what always seems like an eternity when starting any M$ OS."

Yup, and a Linux bootup takes so much less time...

Re:First thing that pops into my head ...

[fitten]

....is that you don't know what "mission critical" really means if you are running them on any form of PC, to begin with, and Linux, to end with.

Second thing that pops into my head is that you are simply a fanboy troll.

Re:First thing that pops into my head ...

[blahlemon]

I can understand you wanting to have your 7 year old running XP (as much as I hate to admit that here!)

My personal experience with XP (it's on my wife's computer) is that the games I play are somewhat stable but if I play them too long or if there is a lot of reloading, IE between games in NHL 2003, it tends to crash.

oh sure, they've replaced the BSOD with a little "would you like to tell Big Brother all your problems" prompt...but that doesn't mean it's more stable. It just appears to be.

Re:First thing that pops into my head ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Installing Solitaire, Freecell and Minesweeper isn't *my* idea of buying a kid new games.

I can't believe it would stay up all that time if she was playing anything else.

Re:First thing that pops into my head ...

[stratjakt]

I haven't had any problems whatsoever with NHL 2003, actually only problem I had was with NOLF2 (which of course was their fault, not the OS's).

If linux became 'the desktop' platform tomorrow, all the publishers would be writing the same code, just for a different platform, and they'd crash just as often. I'd say at least 99% of all the bugs/crashes/problems I encounter are the fault of an application, or my own.

And the prompt box does mean it's more stable - it tells me that the OS detected and cleanly removed a rogue app, and recovered the resources it had in use.

Re:First thing that pops into my head ...

[blahlemon]

If you consider stability to be measured by the lack of need to reboot then you are correct. If, on the other hand, you consider stability to be measured by the consistant functioning and/or failing of the system then you are incorrect (by my estimation.)

I find there are few things that I can consistantly do to product a debugging script on a regular basis. On the other hand I notice it tends to go in busts of popping up more one week then the next, even when just surfing the web.

On top of that my issues with the pop up box is why send the message to Microsoft if they never get back to me nor seem to fix the problem?

Re:First thing that pops into my head ...

[stratjakt]

Well, you can shut off that box, and I have applications crash in linux all the time, it's not a Microsoft phenomena. My point is, since the overwhelming majority of apps and games are written for windows, it follows that that's where the majority of bugs are going to be.

Microsoft just logs the problems, that's all. I mean how is Microsoft going to fix a bug in NHL 2003?

The box doesn't replace BSOD. What replaces BSOD is an automatic reboot (the idea being that if your server crashes on you it'll reboot without user intervention).

It's infinately more frustrating to troubleshoot (but again can be turned off), and the only time I've seen it was a hardware failure (bad stick of RAM). I haven't seen a driver conflict, stack overflow, invalid pointer, etc, bring my system down yet.

Re:First thing that pops into my head ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm biased due to my years of favorable experiences with Linux supporting millions-of-pageviews-per-day websites or mission critical ecommerce applications that simply can never be down, but I can just picture my kids crying "Daddy we want to watch Tom and Jerry" as I struggle to reboot the machine and wait through what always seems like an eternity when starting any M$ OS.

I've been running Windows XP every day, several hours a day for about a year now. In all that time it's crashed once. Apps have crashed more frequently, but not the OS itself.

I'm not sure where your struggle is to reboot the machine, I usually just push the power button -- maybe you should try that.

As for an eternity to start, it takes 31 seconds from power on to viewing a web page in IE. Linux, running Gnome, takes over twice as long to boot on the same machine...and that's before starting mozilla.

Hmm...

[NetJunkie]

First, you can't buy the software to build your own. Which means most of the options right now cost a lot. I'd like to build a cheap(er) box aimed JUST at the Media Center features and not also need it to be a great gaming PC or whatever from Gateway.

I don't want a PC. I want a nice AV unit in my component rack, like my TiVo. But the TiVo is getting dated. I need high def support. I need faster processing so I don't get annoyed at the menus. I think if you'd put the TiVo interface on the RePlay hardware we'd have a hit. Good interface with the best features.

We're getting OT, but its a point to make

[FortKnox]

I agree with your second point also, which is why PC games and consoles will always coexist.

Re:your sig.

[iuyterw]

Your mom?

ha, ha..

just kidding

Bring your Lawyers!

[Angry White Guy]

From the article:
Before you can proceed in the program guide setup you have to scroll through the 44 pages of the Terms of Service and select agree. Once again, this is done fairly quickly using the remote just by holding the down-arrow and then hitting ok.

That's good, sound advice there. Don't bother reading it.

Re:Bring your Lawyers!

[notque]

Ha Ha.

Brilliant, and ToS is considered legally binding, right?

I think everyone needs to collectively take ToS a bit more seriously. No need to continue to reenforce the lacksidasical approach.

Re:Bring your Lawyers!

[Anonymous Coward]

>Ha Ha.
Brilliant, and ToS is considered legally binding, right?
I think everyone needs to collectively take ToS a bit more seriously.
No need to continue to reenforce the lacksidasical approach.
>
>
This guy's bank must just *LOVE* seeing this guy whenever he walks in and applies for a loan or credit card. "Hey Mike here come Joe Sucker!"

Re:Bring your Lawyers!

[moorg]

Not to troll, but what's keeping Microsoft from cutting off your program updates if you decide to modify the hardware? ala Xbox...

Freevo really has me interested right now. Now I just need to pick out the right capture card.

Re:Bring your Lawyers!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd really like to see the 44 page EULA on this one to see what you can expect. This really comes across as more of a service than a product. A free service, yes, but a service nonetheless. Does anyone know who publishes the guides for this? Are these parsed directly from websites like TVGuide, or is MS supplying the middleware for this?
Although I do think that this is a step in the right direction to unifying media, I am glad that there are open source options out there. There are certain things that I really don't understand about the MS effort, like the wrapping of MPEG2 files in a WMA layer. This seems like an unnecessary step to me, but it would be crucial for DRM. This is probably why the OS supports only hardware mpeg capture.

I doubt that..

[notque]

I really doubt that Microsoft is making this software with any intention aside from

3. Profit.

I don't think they have any grudge for Tivo, they just would like to make money off anything they can.

Microsoft has a wonderful monopoly going. Everyone knows they want/need a computer, and it comes packaged with so many things that most people don't have any idea what they bought it for.

They just continue to package things in it that people will use. Tivo may never make it, but when Microsoft can just bundle things together, you will.

I don't like corn, but if i had to buy it at the store every time I bought carrots, I would own a lot of corn, and you would never know I hated it.

Re:I doubt that..

[Anonymous Coward]

every time I bought carrots

And what do buy with these carrots? Do you hit the pharacy and grab a tube of KY as well?

Re:I doubt that..

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if your mom insists..

Re:I doubt that..

[ProtonMotiveForce]

Oh come on, quit your sophistry. This has nothing to do with MS's monopoly. This is a separate product available only to OEM manufacturers for a very specific purpose. This isn't destined for every desktop, at least not yet.

Re:I doubt that..

[Malcontent]

"I don't like corn, but if i had to buy it at the store every time I bought carrots, I would own a lot of corn, and you would never know I hated it."

And this is exactly why there are constraints on monopolies. Of course any constraint on a monopoly is purely theoretical at this moment given the current administration.

Re:I doubt that..

[Moofie]

You're absoultely right. Microsoft won't use its embrace and extend policy, like it has for the last 20 years, on this new market segment, because they've decided to start playing nice. You can tell, because every new MS home-theater PC includes a little fuzzy bunny that hugs you when you use the computer.

XP Media Center is the next part of the wedge, right behind xBox. Until MS is getting a (large) percentage of your cable bill, they won't stop.

Re:I doubt that..

[drsmithy]

"I don't like corn, but if i had to buy it at the store every time I bought carrots, I would own a lot of corn, and you would never know I hated it."

Maybe you should start shopping at a different store...

Re:I doubt that..

[notque]

You think they will stop when they have a large portion of your cable bill?

You underestimate their goals danielson

Re:I doubt that..

[Moofie]

A clause necessary, but not sufficient.

: )

OEMs only

[stratjakt]

This just stinks.

Why cant I buy this OS retail? It's the first new OS product from MSFT that I'm interested in.

I've been playing with hooking my PCs to TV's as the primary display for awhile now, since I first got the original All-in-wonder card, and as far as running windows on the desktop, the problem is always the same - the display is just too lo-res.

You can set it to 640x480, set the fonts to extra-large, but it still doesn't affect a truly system wide change, and setting non-standard widget sizes in the appearance tab makes for awkward glitchy windows.

Besides, it's more than font size - the desktop is basically just monitor-only.

I want a version of windows that has a 'lo-res' mode tailored for TV output. Big scrolling/rotating start menus, big icons with big fonts.

I don't want linux, because aside from watching movies, gaming is a must-have on the big screen (and more of the motivation).

Now they have something I want, but I cant 'roll my own', I have to overpay 3000$ for a proprietary machine like I was a mac user or something.

Does anyone know of a good desktop replacement for 2k/XP that might do what I want?

Re:OEMs only

[dabraun]

The machines are about $1700. I agree it is a lot. Btu they are only selling it on OEM machines because this is a "complicated scenario to get right" and if they sold it as a seperate piece of software for anyone to buy and try out on their machines they would have a lot of complaints about it not working or not working well on hardware x, y, or z. They know, have been able to validate, that it works well with certain specific hardware - the OEMs all have to pick hardware that works well ... I don't like it either, but I understand the "why" behind it. David

Re:OEMs only

[stratjakt]

I understand the 'why' behind it as well.

All I'm really asking for is a theme/mode/setting for regular Windows installs to be workable on a Lo-res device (Not just TV, but open it up to cheap LCD displays for 'embedded' systems and whatnot).

Even if I bought a high-end HDTV, it still wouldn't be a usable desktop if I'm sitting in the couch on the other side of the room.

I just want to run windows on anything other than a PC monitor.

Re:OEMs only

[shyster]

All I'm really asking for is a theme/mode/setting for regular Windows installs to be workable on a Lo-res device (Not just TV, but open it up to cheap LCD displays for 'embedded' systems and whatnot).

All depends on what you want to do with your PC on your TV. As far as general desktop goodness goes, give Talisman or a similar shell replacement (Object Desktop has a nice one as well) a try. They'll allow you to create your own theme with as large of buttons as your heart desires. Of course, apps are another issue all together...it's dependent on the app. Throwiing a skin together in WinAmp3 shouldn't be too difficult though, and now that it plays video files too, you may have a winner there. Gaming at 640x480 on a TV has never been a problem for me, so I think you're covered there too. To min/max/close apps that aren't skinnable, try using the keyboard combos instead of manipulating the mouse pointer.

Maybe some day developers will start using standard widgets and fonts and then you'll actually be able to control them, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

44 Page EULA

[Milo Fungus]

From the article:

Before you can proceed in the program guide setup you have to scroll through the 44 pages of the Terms of Service and select agree. Once again, this is done fairly quickly using the remote just by holding the down-arrow and then hitting ok. (Emphasis added)

Reading 44 pages is hardly a quick task, no matter if you have a remote control, scrolling mouse, or whatever. Unless it reads like 44 pages from a Dr. Seuss book. Then I wouldn't mind so much.

You may not reverse engineer on a train, you may not reverse engineer in the rain. You may not share files with a fox, you may not let files leave this box...

Re:44 Page EULA

[stratjakt]

Of course it's displayed in an incredibly huge font for readability on a TV screen.

It's the same 2-3 page "VGA-sized" liscense we all know and love.

Re:44 Page EULA

[shepd]

>Once again, this is done fairly quickly using the remote just by holding the down-arrow and then hitting ok.

So, basically, they didn't read it at all. If the reviewers can't be bothered, will the users be?

For all we know, it might say in there that you need to give your first born to Bill G.

Re:44 Page EULA

[shyster]

You may not reverse engineer on a train, you may not reverse engineer in the rain. You may not share files with a fox, you may not let files leave this box...

It's not exactly Seussian, but it does rhyme =) (taken from the actual Win2K Pro EULA on my system):

Don't use on multiple PC's, we'll call the software Nazi's.
If this is an upgrade, you better have paid.
This covers an update, it's not up to fate.
You can sell your CD, if they agree to me.
Don't reverse engineer, or live in fear.
If we cancel at will, you throw it in a landfill.
We collect your details, and we read your emails.
Sun says don't trust java, because it will harm ya'.
There are no warranties, we will not hear your pleas.
It's protected by copyright, so don't try to fight.
You will be tried in Redmond, we will have a big lawyer fund.
You must be crazy, to read to the end of me.

More cliches

[M.C. Hampster]

We need to develop some sort of global cache list so we can add the following from the article:

Today's PCs on the other hand are infinitely more powerful than current set-top boxes...

Isn't this a bit of an exageration? Obviously, they can't be "infinately" more powerful, but are they even considerably more powerful? I'm not too familiar with the spec's on PVR's, but I would bet they aren't that weak.

Re:More cliches

[spacefrog]

The MPEG encoding/decoding process on PVR's is hardware-assisted, so in terms of raw CPU power, not much is really needed. TiVo boxes, for example, have fairly low-end PPC chips.

Re:More cliches

[Mike Hicks]

I seem to recall that the Tivo's processor is somewhere in the range of 50-150MHz. The video encoding/decoding is offloaded onto special-purpose hardware. This means it's very hard or impossible for you to play video/audio formats that aren't hard-wired into the system -- a restriction you don't really have when you've got a PC with a GHz or so of processing power.

Biggest downside of a PC from my perspective is the noise. I put together a MythTV box for my apartment, but had to go find some new fans to quiet the sucker down..

Re:More cliches

[geekoid]

"Isn't this a bit of an exageration? "

no, it's a lie.
unless your in marketing, then there are no lies, only sales numbers.

Re:More cliches

[tjrw]

A TiVo series 1 has a 54MHz PowerPC (403 I believe). The video formatting is no more restricted than MCE - it uses MPEG2 encoding. The encoding chip is made by Sony, and the decoding chip by IBM, at least in the standalone (non DirecTiVo) units.

I find it astonishing that MCE consumes 40% cpu of a multi-gigahertz chip and still stutters, yet my sub-100MHz TiVo can record one stream and playback another without breaking a sweat.

TiVo series 2 units are a built using a MIPS core (ISTR), at around 200 MHz. This makes the UI more responsive, but the series 1 has enough power to do its job. It goes to show what a remarkably good job the TiVo engineering people did.

I don't believe it's generally available yet, but there is software in the pipeline for Series 2 owners to enable use as an MP3 jukebox, picture/slideshow viewer, and to allow remote programming of your unit over the web via TiVo's site.

So, yes, a PC is obviously a general purpose machine whereas a PVR is not, and theoretically more flexible, but in reality, the PVRs currently do the job better (cheaper, quieter ...), and are quuickly expanding their capabilities.

Tim

Re:More cliches

[iawia]

True, but there's no reason why that wouldn't be the same for home-built PVR machines.
VDR for instance uses the hardware decoder on the DVB card, and MythTV can use (well, in the version in CVS:-) hardware MJPEG encoding available for instance on a Matrox Marvel G200 and up.

Uh.. wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad to see the Anandtech guy post stuff that's dead wrong. Firstly, Windows media player 9 final, does NOT play MCE based files other than on the MCE box. It won't play it on non-MCE machines. Secondly, windvd 4.0 most definitely works with this, as I've built a home-made MCE box using only windvd 4 and it had no problems.

Re:Uh.. wrong...

[stratjakt]

So MS liscensed you as an OEM? If not, how exactly did you home-build a MCE box, seeing as how it's not available as a standalone product?

Re:Uh.. wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

This:

'Presenting Media Center Edition Do it yourself (DIY) project.'

http://www.winbeta.org/modules.php?name=News&fil e= article&sid=3

Combine

1 part Hauppauge PVR-250 capture board
2 parts drivers from www.shspvr.com
1 part Compusa random IR remote

Stir
1 XP Iso with MCE DIY kit

Voila! works well on a p3-850....

Good one!

[notque]

I find it odd I never thought of that. :)

Please help us compete!

[fons]

We're trying to make a similar thing based on linux. (it's called DAVE/DINA and you can read all about that strange name -and more- over here).
I must admit, we were pretty surprised with this version of XP. It looks really cool (we haven't tried it though).

It made us realize we have to speed up our work on DAVE/DINA. So we're planning our first ISO-release this month.

It will include:
- Watching TV
- RECORDING TV (only europ i think)
- Playing/grabbing music
- Music Database
- Photo gallery
- playing/grabbing DVD
- playing DIVX

but a lot of work needs to be done. We hope to lure some contributors with this release.

But you can already start to help us now: Visit our website, and comment on our plans (so we know what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong), or make us a cool new logo

Re:Please help us compete!

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell kind of name is "apestaart"? The first thing I thought of was a monkey with jumper cables clipped to his ears.

Re:Please help us compete!

[fons]

"apestaart" is dutch for "monkey tail", the tail of a monkey.

It's also the name of this sign: @

So in English @ = "at" and in dutch @ = "apestaart"

This is reflected in our logo.

Cable Boxes

[NetJunkie]

How do these and other open source projects handle things like cable boxes? The TiVo will change the box for me. I can't rely on a TV Tuner card to handle that since I need my digital cable box.

Does anyone make IR blasters that will talk to those boxes that can be made to work?

Re:Cable Boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone make IR blasters that will talk to those boxes that can be made to work?

In the article it not only mentions IR blasters, but shows a picture of one that's included with the HP MCE computer.

Re:Cable Boxes

[jthomas2]

Go to radio shack, buy an IR lead, stick it on your serial port between DTR & ground. Use Lirc http://www.lirc.org/ and download the ir remote database. Use rc to send remote commands.

It's actually pretty easy.

-Jay

one to rule it all

[Anonymous Coward]

The moment I fixed a fir device for my pc I discovered lirc
and from that moment I turned my pc into all multimedia I need controled with one simple remote controll
I have a tv-card with radio. The software i use si lirc, zapping, xmms and mplayer.
Watching this thing about Windows XP Media Center, I thought been there, done that.

Processor usage

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting how a 2.53GHz P4 with mpeg2 encoding in hardware struggles to do what my Tivo does well with a 50Mhz PPC.

BTW, did I mention my Tivo has never crashed in 2 years?

Re:Processor usage

[Anonymous Coward]

That's cuz a PPC chip ruleez

Re:Processor usage

[fitten]

... and that TiVo also has dedicated MPEG hardward and a custom ASIC (dunno what the custom ASIC does, didn't both to check further than to see if it had MPEG hardware, which it pretty much would have to have).

http://penguinppc.org/embedded/tivo/hardware/

The PPC is just there for the user interface and possibly shoveling data around (probably for just setting up DMA engines). The PPC403 is *not* a heavyweight computing device.

Re:Lack of GENERAL support

[ianjk]

With support like this, I highly doubt that this product is going to get much support from the general public. Most windows users aren't going to go out and buy new hardware for their PC, just to run a new flavor of windows that has the same functionality as a PVR. When faced with the choice of a set top box or a dedicated system/hardware/OS upgrade, joe consumer is probably just going to run and buy a little set top box with only a couple of cables, that is proven easy to use and save the hastle/time/money.

Just Say No

[core plexus]

Troll me, flame me, but here it is again:

1. There still isn't enough good stuff to incite me to want to do this, yet.

2. I use Linux, so Microsoft won't work with my stuff anyway.

3. Excessive consumerism-no one really needs one of these, it is just more marketing hype by the Redmond Bug Factory. Instead, why not spend the money on helping Open-source projects. Take 10% of what you spend on Microsoft and other proprietary software/hardware, and the quality of open-source will improve dramatically.

Hospital computer makes fatal error Hmmm, Windows?

Re:Just Say No

[MojoMonkey]

3. Excessive consumerism-no one really needs one of these, it is just more marketing hype by the Redmond Bug Factory. Instead, why not spend the money on helping Open-source projects. Take 10% of what you spend on Microsoft and other proprietary software/hardware, and the quality of open-source will improve dramatically.


But how does THAT benefit ME. More importantly, how does that benefit me RIGHT NOW!?!?!?

well I'll give them this...

[istar]

I am happy to see that instead of adding on and redoing windows 98 over and over (thus 98 SE, thus ME, thus 2000), they decided to rebuild the entire source code from scratch. A lot of errors were fixed and some extra considerations for security (however weak on default install) meaning they are stepping foward in the right direction.

I do think their XP product is very good in terms of stability, and despite the major difference between 2000 and XP the compataility with hardware beats any other operating system I know of. I tip my hat to the XP team on their progress.

Great review, so I hope it sheds a bit more light on the MS company and how they are working to improve the products. (guess this means they have grown up enough to stop 'stealing' code? ;) )

Re:well I'll give them this...

[xid]

dude, you've made at least four technical errors in this post. I don't know where to start. 2K isn't on the same kernel as 9x. MS never rebuilds from scratch, especially with MCE, which is like an overlay for XP. 2K and XP don't have any 'major' differences--bubbly windows aren't a major improvement, and 'system restore' is a pain in the ass. I know there are more, but I have actually gone back to 2K after months of XP use. Hardware compatability? Learn to update drivers.

Re:well I'll give them this...

[istar]

2K does have the same code-base as 98, I should I know used to do tech support for it. Additions and enhancements have been mad to the libs and libraries for the visual effects and security changes, but still the same base kernel with additions.
XP took the kernel and rebuilt it by hand, taking out the extra thousand lines of commented out coding as well as unneeded subs. A complete, redone, finished, NEW kernel was applied (not to mention a completely revised GUI code). Yes, even if they made major inprovements it still is a pain in the ass OS simply because it isnt BSD :)

In my opinion, XP uses too much RAM and sys res. than needed, and I too have stuck to BSD and 2K boot systems. I was merely applauding the XP team for getting closer to getting it right.

Re:well I'll give them this...

[t0ny]

Ya, you *supposedly* did tech support for *them* (whatever and whoever you mean by that). If Win2k is based on any code base, it would have been Windows NT, not 95. That is why old Windows 95 programs will not run on Win2k, but NT programs probably will. Also, ALL the networking works pretty much exactly like WinNT- I should know, I work on both WinNT and Win2k servers.

I do network engineering, I am an MCSE, and I am (was?) certified in Windows 95 way back in the day. So as far as being technically qualified to say what the OS is based on, I would definitely put my experience against some guy who did 'tech support' for 'them'.

Also, XP is based on Win2k. It was not written completely by hand. That is why "NT5", aka Windows 2000 (another clue as to the codebase?) had a much longer development cycle than XP (which actually shows up in Server Manager as NT5.1- thats strange...)

So please go peddle your misinformation elsewhere; maybe you can impress your mom with how much you know about computers, but Im not impressed.

Re:well I'll give them this...

[Blkdeath]

2K does have the same code-base as 98, I should I know used to do tech support for it.

I'm afraid you're mistaken. Aside from the fact that doing tech support for a product does not give you intricate knowledge of the internal function of the system; the Windows 2000 operating system is the Windows NT kernel (originating from Microsoft and IBM's partnered development of OS/2) with the Windows 95/98 interface, with some enhancements, new filesystem support (NTFS is reminiscant of HPFS), and multi-user support enhancements over NT's kludged multi-user capabilities. (The NT kernel, their user interface(s), and their filesystems were not designed initially for multi-user support).

I'd quote history pages for you, but the resources on the Internet are so plentiful I'd just be seen as karma whoring.

XP took the kernel and rebuilt it by hand, taking out the extra thousand lines of commented out coding as well as unneeded subs.

Apart from the blatant contradiction of this statement (if they re-wrote it from scratch, what did they "remove"?) - how are we to believe you've come aquainted with this information?

Re:well I'll give them this...

[istar]

While I appreciate the insight, please next time read all threads, rather than lagging back on one that has already been corrected and replied to.
The problem has already been solved and I've already been corrected. Thanks though.

Re:well I'll give them this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see if I get this straight. MSFT removed 1,000 lines of code that weren't doing anything to start with and also the subroutines that were never getting called, recompiled it and put it into a new box and is now selling it as a different product altogether?

That's like pulling a few feathers off a chicken and selling it as a football.

Re:well I'll give them this...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking choad!

Slow Down Cowboy!

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment

Note: chances are, you're behind a firewall, or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. We know about those kinds of errors. But if you think you shouldn't be getting this error, feel free to file a bug report, telling us:

* Your browser type
* Your userid "628844"
* What steps caused this error
* Whether you used the Back button on your browser
* Whether or not you know your ISP to be using a proxy, or any sort of service that gives you an IP that others are using simultaneously
* How many posts to this form you successfully submitted during the day

Please set the Category to "Formkeys."

Thank you.

Re: linux troll?

[JSkills]

Nah I'm no Linux troll, just someone who's being honest based on my experiences. Sorry you felt the need to reply to me and so many others on this thread to tell us how wrong we all are.

The fact that you seem unable to grasp the basic notion that M$ servers have a reputation for needing constant reboots is sad (for you).

My analogy was a comparison between large scale dynamically published websites / ecommerce applications and a PVR server. So how does your analogy about your 7 year old's PC even apply here?

And who mentioned games? Tux Racer is a joke? Who's trolling now?

Your absolutely correct

[Anonymous Coward]

A generic Linux install wouldn't even let you know about patches.

Re:Your absolutely correct

[Eric Damron]

"A generic Linux install..."

What ever that is...

Re:Same old same old

[nagora]

Your post is just crap. Seriously.

Did you read the article?

TWW

The article

[Anonymous Coward]

Server's getting slow...Here you go. Posting anonymously because I like to earn my karma the hard way. Sorry for no pictures. There's a lot of content in the images.

Windows XP Media Center Edition: Exposed
Date: January 08, 2003
Type: Systems
Manufacturer: Microsoft
Author: Anand Lal Shimpi

Page: 1

For the past 15 years Homer, Marge, Maggie, Lisa and Bart all piled into their living room, hopped on the brown couch and let their faces be illuminated by the glow of their television screen. For millions of people, The Simpsons became a weekly ritual; much like the opening credits, they funneled into their rooms, jumped on a piece of cozy furniture and stared mindlessly into the lives of 5 fictionally yellow characters. But what happened when you had to work late one night, or you forgot about the extra long Halloween special? Before you could search for these shows online, before TiVo and before ReplayTV - a VHS cassette and a VCR was all you needed.

The power to record the TV shows you want to watch has been around for quite some time; the VCR brought the technology to the mainstream, but it lacked some refinement and features that would truly make it suitable for recording TV shows you'd miss. The main problem with the VCR was that it was not an intelligent device; it couldn't detect conflicts, it couldn't tell you if you were going to record a rerun or if this week's episode of the Simpsons would start 10 minutes later than usual. Not being able to get your regular dose of the Simpsons isn't a life or death situation but it would be nice.

Whenever AMD or Intel release a new CPU, everyone asks the question what we need faster processors for? The most common response for that is "to enable future applications" and a couple of years ago, there was enough processing power in a cheap enough form to finally give the VCR a brain - the idea of a set-top Personal Video Recorder (PVR) was born.

The idea was simple; what if your VCR could intelligently record the shows that you want to watch. You don't want to watch whatever is on Fox at 8PM on Sundays, you want to watch The Simpsons, regardless of when they are on. In order to add intelligence to an otherwise dumb piece of electronics all you need is a dedicated processor and a good software interface. But as is the case with most things this "simple", the process of making an intelligent VCR is much easier said than done.

Page: 2 A Series of Simple Attempts

It became very clear early on that a home PC was not the ideal machine for a PVR, the main limitation being an easy to use interface to harness a PC-PVR's power.

Out of all of the hardware manufacturers, ATI came the closest to truly offering a solution that could transform your PC into a full-fledged PVR that you could rely on to capture those priceless Simpsons memories. Compared to 3dfx, Matrox and NVIDIA, ATI had considerably more experience in video capture functionality built into their consumer cards. Both 3dfx and NVIDIA were late comers to the game, 3dfx with their Voodoo3 3500TV and NVIDIA with their Personal Cinema, both being released in the past few years. Matrox had much experience with professional video editing and eventually brought some of that expertise to the home with their Marvel line of graphics cards, but ATI had been bridging the gap between home PCs and TVs for quite some time.

Dating back to their PC2TV line of cards that boasted fairly impressive (for their time) TV output quality, ATI has been focusing on developing the hardware and software to make this dream of an intelligent VCR come true. ATI's latest All-in-Wonder line comes extremely close; closer than any previous attempt, but ATI is still bound by the tragic flaw of a PC based PVR - the Windows interface.

Companies like SONICblue and TiVo were not bound by this tragic flaw; instead they attempted to introduce the PVR as a set-top box, much like the VCR. TiVo introduced their aptly named TiVo PVR as a concept in 1997 and once product started shipping, received strong support from the market. Through acquisition, SONICblue became proprietor of the ReplayTV brand - TiVo's primary competition. Both solutions offered all of the intelligent features we just mentioned including a very easy to use interface, but they were bound by the small amount of dedicated resources these set-top boxes had.

Today's PCs on the other hand are infinitely more powerful than current set-top boxes, and in theory could duplicate any of their functionality. The hardware is here today, all we need is someone to step forward and provide an easy to use interface and bring it to the masses. For that we turn to a company that is quite possibly the single most influential in the computing industry, Microsoft.

Microsoft has stepped forth and provided an enabling platform for transforming the PC into a PVR; they call this platform Windows XP Media Center Edition. As the name implies, Windows XP Media Center Edition is designed to turn your PC into no less than a "media center." A device you can use to watch TV, record the shows you want, store your videos, and create a picture album and more. It is Media Center Edition that will supposedly turn your PC into an "uber PVR"; finding out whether or not Microsoft has accomplished that is the focus of this review.

Page: 3 Introducing Media Center Edition

Much like Tablet PC Edition, Media Center Edition (MCE) is largely based on the Windows XP Professional kernel. In fact, if you strip away the Media Center part of the equation you will be left with a fully functional copy of Windows XP Professional. What Media Center adds to the OS is primarily support for the Media Center application, which appears as nothing more than a regular program in your Start Menu.

There's much more to MCE than the Media Center application however; for starters, MCE uses a nonstandard codec for compressing all of the shows it records. Fundamentally, all programming is recorded in an MPEG-2 format with an ASF wrapper; Microsoft's ASF (Advanced Systems Format) works perfectly in this case as it can act as nothing more than a container for media encoded in a different format, more specially MPEG-2 encoded audio and video.

The ASF wrapper effectively prevents two things from happening with the shows that MCE records; first of all, you can playback anything recorded in MCE but the playback system must be able to read this unique ASF wrapped file format. Currently, the only application that supports playback of MCE recorded files is Windows Media Player 9.

The ASF wrapper also currently prevents transcoding into other media formats, such as DiVX. We'd expect this to change eventually but currently you're stuck with the "bloated" MPEG-2 encoded video. One of the benefits of a PC based PVR, as we mentioned before, is the ability to transcode and store your recorded shows in whatever format you desire - especially in DiVX/MPEG-4 formats, something no other PVR can currently do.

Playback of MCE recorded files on the MCE machine itself doesn't require Windows Media Player 9, rather just the MCE application and a specific MPEG-2 codec. For whatever reason, version 3.0 of Intervideo's WinDVD has the appropriate MPEG-2 codec necessary for MCE. What's even more confusing is that WinDVD 4.0 will not work, as MCE will complain about not being able to find the appropriate playback codec. And no, installing WinDVD 3.0 on another computer won't let you playback MCE recorded files, you need to actually have MCE installed for that to work.

That pretty much sums it up for the software side of MCE; not to discount the amazing amount of work that has gone into MCE, as we'll be getting to the incredible interface shortly, but as you can see there's not much to it at a high level.

Page: 4 How a PVR Works

Despite the fact that you can buy a set-top PVR for well under $400, the process of simply "pausing live TV" is quite complicated and very hardware intensive. So before we delve into Microsoft's hardware requirements for MCE let's go through how a PVR works.

Let's say you get all of your TV channels through a standard coaxial cable; the process is very similar with satellite dishes and cable boxes but for simplicity sake we'll just assume we're talking about a regular cable feed.

The cable feed is plugged into a coaxial input on the PVR that is controlled by a TV tuner chip; on a PC this would be found on a TV tuner card. After selecting the channel to watch, the TV tuner then hands the signal off to the PVR's MPEG-2 encode engine. The MPEG-2 encode can be done via a dedicated processor or in software and handled entirely by the host CPU in a PC based PVR. As the stream is recorded it is buffered and written to the PVR's hard drive, which means that as long as the PVR is on it is always writing streams of data to the hard drive.

If you're doing more than just recording a show, as in you are actually watching it while it is being recorded, then as the data is being written to the hard drive it is also being read and fed into a MPEG-2 decode engine. Since a good amount of the MPEG-2 decode pipeline is already done on today's GPUs, the process is usually not very CPU intensive and is split between the host CPU and the graphics hardware - at least in a PC; a set-top PVR may have a chip dedicated to MPEG-2 decode.

After the MPEG-2 stream is decoded from the hard drive it is then sent off to a TV encoder before it exits the PVR through a S-Video or other video output cable to your TV. On a PC based PVR the MPEG-2 stream could even bypass the TV encoder and be sent directly to an application for display on a monitor.

With this in mind, realize that when you're "pausing live TV" the process doesn't actually stop. The TV encoder may only be displaying a single frame from the hard drive, but the rest of the PVR process must continue so that when you hit pause again you haven't lost any data. The hard drive is always being hit, the memory is constantly being read from and the CPU is forever encoding - you can already begin to see that something as simple as a digital VCR would take some serious hardware to implement properly.

A PC based PVR would require a very fast CPU, high bandwidth (and low latency) memory subsystem and very fast I/O. Slowdowns would be unacceptable; if the hardware isn't able to keep up with the demands of the entire recording/playback process then you end up with recordings that stutter, have garbled audio or worse.

Then we have the problem of maintaining stability; while today's PC hardware has matured considerably even compared to what was around just a couple of years ago, stability is a very serious concern. With such great stress being placed on most of the major subsystems in a PC (CPU, memory, I/O), a single failure in any one of them could interrupt your viewing or recording. Who wants to explain to a room of people why they need to "reboot the TV" because it crashed? Drivers become more important than ever as managing the interaction of all of this hardware must be done flawlessly, not to mention that the OS must be robust as well.

We can say with reasonable confidence that with a Windows XP Professional base, the OS side of things is taken care of. But what about the hardware itself? What about drivers?

Microsoft's solution to the problem is actually twofold...

Page: 5 MCE's Hardware Requirements

First, Microsoft limited hardware support for MCE; Media Center will only work with TV tuner cards that handle MPEG-2 encode entirely in hardware, no offloading to the host CPU will be allowed. The idea behind this requirement is that hardware MPEG-2 will reduce CPU utilization and thus be able to guarantee no-stutter viewing more readily than software based MPEG-2 encoders.

Click to Enlarge

The downside to this requirement is that the vast majority of TV tuner cards available will not work; this includes the TV tuner that's a part of ATI's All-in-Wonder Radeon 9700. Currently there are only two cards supported by MCE - the Hauppauge WinTV PVR and the Emuzed Maui PCI PVR (pictured above). We'll talk about how effective (or ineffective) this requirement is later on in the performance section of this review, but right now we're just trying to explain the requirements set forth by Microsoft.

As you can probably guess, this single hardware requirement has come under significant fire from both ATI and NVIDIA. From what we've heard, ATI is trying desperately to get Microsoft to lift this requirement so that their All-in-Wonder tuners may be used with MCE. As far as other hardware requirements go, the specification also calls for an IR remote among other things but the hardware MPEG-2 encode is by far the most unique.

The second part of Microsoft's attempt to guarantee that MCE would work flawlessly as a PVR involves limiting who can make Media Center PCs. At the time of publication there are only six manufacturers that are producing Media Center PCs: ABS, Alienware, CyberPower, Gateway, HP and Northgate.

As you can guess, you can't go out and buy Windows XP Media Center Edition; Microsoft's reasoning behind this is that they don't want a handful of "low-cost" or flawed implementations out on the market giving MCE a bad name. If Microsoft is to be taken seriously in the PVR market, MCE must be very competitive with both set-top and currently available PC solutions; poorly made Media Center PCs could seriously tarnish the brand and would work against Microsoft's success.

Page: 6 Testing MCE

In order to evaluate MCE we went out and purchased the first Media Center PC that was available - the HP Media Center PC 873n. We will get to actually looking at this PC in a bit, but first we want to take you through a tour of setting up and using Media Center.

Firing up a Media Center PC for the first time leaves you with nothing more than a brand new PC with Windows XP Professional installed. Obviously since the PC is running MCE, there is one new button under the Accessories menu but other than that the turn-on phase is nothing special.

Clicking on the Media Center link will launch the MCE interface, which is where we'll start our tour.

Page: 7 A Remote Controlled PC

Although all Media Center PCs ship with a keyboard and mouse, the preferred method of controlling the Media Center interface is via remote; after all, who wants to flip channels with a keyboard? Click to Enlarge

Microsoft left the OEMs up to design and implement their own remote controls, so they will vary from one Media Center PC to the next. For this test we used HP's remote (above), which is a little over 8" long and about 2" wide. The buttons have good tactile feel and the remote itself feels just like any home theater remote, albeit a bit skinnier than most (see it compared to a standard Toshiba TV remote below).

Click to Enlarge

The remote communicates with its receiver using an infrared signal, which does require line of sight between the remote and the receiver itself. The HP remote in particular is relatively good at not being too directional, although it's not as flexible as ATI's Remote Wonder that uses radio frequency to communicate.

The receiver itself carries a USB 1.0 interface, which is all that is necessary considering the limited amount of data that is sent between the receiver and the system itself. The remote essentially sends keystroke combinations to the receiver over IR which are then sent directly to the system, definitely not enough to saturate the 11Mbps USB 1.0 interface at all.

The HP IR Receiver

The receiver has two 1/8" outputs for IR blasters; which are necessary if you're using a set-top cable box. The IR blaster works just like any other, the remote sends its signals to the receiver which then retransmits the channel switching to the cable box. Because of the additional step, switching channels with a cable box/IR blaster takes longer than usual but that's to be expected.

IR Blaster

It is worth noting that there is no serial connection on the HP receiver for a direct connection to a cable box. Some PVRs offer a serial link to a cable box in order to avoid using an IR blaster, which makes switching channels much quicker. Not having a serial link in this case would be a huge drawback for cable box users, although it is something that is potentially fixable. We haven't seen any designs that support a serial link to an external cable box but there's nothing stopping a manufacturer from doing so.

The software side of the remote is fairly simple; a single driver is all that's necessary to get the receiver up and running, then a quick setup through MCE will ensure the remote is working properly. The remote is functional outside of MCE but it cannot be used as a mouse replacement like ATI's Remote Wonder; the directional pad can't be used to move your pointer around.

Page: 8 Setting up the Media Center Remote

Microsoft has made the setup and configuration process of MCE extremely simple; everything is done through wizards that are traversed linearly and can all be done using nothing more than your Media Center remote. Even configuring the remote control can be done using the remote (assuming that the drivers were installed properly):

The diagnostic procedure is fairly simple; the corresponding numbers light up on the TV screen as you hit buttons on the remote.

Done.

Page: 9 Setting up your Internet Connection

The next thing you'll want to setup is your Internet connection; MCE uses your Internet connection primarily for downloading updates to its Program Guide, essentially a digital TV guide listing of everything there is to watch for the next two weeks.

The configuration process for your Internet connection is pretty straight forward:

You choose your type of Internet connection and then you're pretty much done after a small test if you'd like:

Page: 10

Setting up the TV

The most involved part of the entire MCE setup is the TV setup; on the hardware side all you need to do is hook up your cable to the coaxial input on the TV tuner card.

The software configuration takes a bit longer but for being the most involving part of the entire MCE setup, it's not bad at all.

The first step requires you to choose your TV signal; for us the cable option was what we needed, but satellite and antenna are also made available. Be warned that if you do have digital cable or satellite with support for HD signals you will not be able to record shows in high definition, they will simply be captured as conventional 480i signals. It will be a while before HD encoding is brought down to the consumer level and definitely not in any of the current generation Media Center PCs.

If you have a cable box this screen will lead you into configuring the IR blaster; we had a direct cable line so the set-top box option was unnecessary.

Page: 11 Setting up the Program Guide

Next we'll be taking you through the setup process for the TV program guide:

Before you can proceed in the program guide setup you have to scroll through the 44 pages of the Terms of Service and select agree. Once again, this is done fairly quickly using the remote just by holding the down-arrow and then hitting ok.

Page: 12

Much like other PVRs, MCE determines what program listing to feed you based initially upon your zip code (inputted via the remote control as usual) and then presents you with a list of cable providers in your area to choose from:

Page: 13

After you select the cable provider it's off to download the program guide information from the net. The guide will update itself automatically every couple of weeks or unless you manually force it.

After you've done all of this the program guide is setup, it's as simple as that.

All of the MCE setup we performed here and more can be configured through the settings screen once you're in MCE, but for now let's get into using the application itself.

Page: 14 Watching TV

The major attraction of Windows XP Media Center Edition is its PVR functionality, and thus the interface is well tuned for watching TV.

Hitting this button will launch Media Center

In order to launch the Media Center interface all you do is hit the green button on the remote; alternatively you could select Media Center from the Start Menu, but the remote control is the preferred way of launching the app.

Firing up the Media Center interface, the first option you're greeted with will start the TV interface. The window in the lower left hand corner does not always appear, it is where your TV/video playback will remain if you navigate away from the playback page. The small window is relatively useless, given the amount of space available on the screen we would have much rather had a larger window such as the one you see on the TV page below:

The initial TV startup will take several seconds as the engine is started and MCE begins buffering (~15 seconds on our HP test system), but after the initial startup you won't encounter that delay any longer. What's important to note is that MCE can switch channels faster than any set-top PVR, this is thanks to the incredible hardware power of a PC.

From this screen you can jump into the program guide, look through shows you've recorded, search for something to watch or configure the TV options. We'll start off by figuring out what to watch using the program guide.

Page: 15

Watching TV - Program Guide

The MCE Program Guide is a guide for TV content much like a TV Guide channel, Guide+ or the guide software on a TiVo or ReplayTV. The guide has show listings for every channel for the next two weeks and is updated online.

The guide can be launched either using the menu pictured on the previous page or through the guide button on the remote (above).

The guide is easy to navigate through and scroll speed is quite fast. The one thing that is worth noting that even on the HP's default Pentium 4 2.53GHz, CPU utilization can reach very high levels while scrolling through the list. Sometimes scrolling through the guide can cause the TV encoding process to stutter which is definitely unfortunate as stuttering isn't nearly this common with set-top PVRs. The problem here seems to be an issue with prioritizing threads, as the TV encode/decode threads should take absolute priority over any other threads contending for CPU time - especially those required to scroll through the program guide.

There's no way to skip from one day of guide listings to the next automatically, you simply have to keep on scrolling from left to right in order to increment the date. Since scrolling is so fast this isn't much of a problem, and the TV encoding doesn't usually stutter when scrolling through time rather than through channels. It would be nice to have a way of skipping through days at a time instead of scrolling through everything.

The first time the guide starts up, resource usage also pikes which will sometimes cause the TV encoding process to stutter as well. What you may find yourself doing is making sure you don't start up the guide while you're recording anything important as the stutters will be recorded to disk.

The guide itself is quite intuitive and left us with no usability complaints (other than the performance issue mentioned above, although we'll address that in the performance section later on), it can easily hold its own against any set-top PVR and looks better than anything we have seen.

Although the guide will automatically update itself, you can customize how often you want it to update or force an update yourself through the guide setup menu under TV settings. If the Media Center interface is closed and the guide goes out to automatically update itself then a small icon will appear in the systray indicating that the guide is being updated. Should any errors occur during the update, MCE will notify you through an icon in the systray as well.

Page: 16 Watching TV - Recording using the Guide

Recording a show is very easy and can be done manually or using the Program guide. In order to record using the Guide you find the show you want to record using the Guide then select it using the "OK" button on the remote; this will leave you at the screen below:

From here you can choose to record the single instance of that show or you can attempt to record every time the show comes on. The record series option is useful for catching every episode of a show and MCE is intelligent enough to not record duplicates such as reruns or the same episode appearing at two separate times.

Selecting advanced record will bring up a number of options for the recording:

Here you can specify more details such as how long to keep the recording and what quality to record it at. The quality options are fair, good, better and best, with best being the highest quality possible. The benefit of using a lower quality setting is that you can record more shows on your drive (they take up less space as they use more lossy compression) but obviously you lose some image quality. The best option looks just as good as the original TV stream (which isn't saying much for Raleigh cable) and although you can tell there's a small drop in quality when recording using the better setting, it's nothing too major.

One useful feature is the ability to customize when you want the recording to start/stop; this is especially handy when a particular show doesn't come on at its scheduled time, because something before it ran long or because of a unique lineup on that channel for that day. There are other shows that almost never start on time, in which case the advanced controls help tremendously.

Page: 17

The program guide is also very powerful for searching for something to watch; you can browse TV shows according to categories:

Search according to show title:

or you can even search by simple keyword:

Page: 18

With all of this talk about recording, what happens if you try and record two things at once? Remember that a Media Center PC will only use one TV tuner card and thus can only be "watching" one TV stream at a given time.

MCE will not let you schedule two recordings that conflict, if you try to you'll be greeted with this screen:

...and you'll be forced to choose between the two. If you can't bring yourself to pick the one you really want, the conflict will be denoted by an exclamation mark in the guide:

In this case, MCE will choose to record the first show that it was asked to record - College Football and the Nutty Professor will just be listed as a conflict.

Conflict resolution is a fairly important aspect of any PVR and the way MCE handles it is decent. Firstly, MCE will not let you purposefully create a conflict as we just illustrated with the above screenshots. Should a conflict arise because a show got moved, MCE will end up recording the first show you selected - there is no ability to control priorities of shows, which is somewhat disappointing.

In the event that a show isn't recorded for a reason other than you deliberately making a conflict the show will appear in MCE's list of recording errors. The fact that MCE keeps a log of all errors is quite handy, just so you know what shows you've missed and for what reason.

Page: 19 Watching TV (continued)

As we explained in the "How a PVR Works" section, whenever you're watching TV through MCE you are recording what you're watching; this is how you can "pause" what you're watching and resume viewing later or rewind to catch something you've missed.

There are some limitations to what you can do that are imposed by MCE; by far the biggest issue is that if you've been watching something and at the end of your viewing decide that you want to save it, you can't. Unless you hit the record button or have told MCE to record the show before hand, you can't go back and save your buffer for viewing later. Even if you hit the record button halfway through watching a show you will only be able to save everything after the point when you hit the record button, you won't be able to retain what you've watched previously. This is a feature that shouldn't have been that difficult to implement, especially considering that ATI lets you do it using their multimedia center software bundled with their All-in-Wonder cards.

Another issue, albeit understandable, occurs when you're not recording a show and leave the TV in paused mode; in this case, MCE will automatically un-pause itself after 30 minutes, which can be a bit startling if you forget to mute your speakers. Also don't forget to close MCE before putting the system into standby, if you don't the system will wake itself up with the TV running loud and clear in order to check to see if it has anything to record. To be on the safe side you'll want to leave the Media Center application closed; don't worry, it will still record your shows and let you know it is doing so by putting a record icon in the systray. The beauty of this silent record mode is that you can use your Media Center PC for just about anything while it is recording a show in the background; be warned though, you don't want to do anything that's too intensive as it could cause your recording to stutter.

If for whatever reason you want to record a block of time, you can do so using the manual record feature of MCE:

The options are fairly self explanatory and are very similar to the advanced record options when recording using the program guide.

Microsoft was very careful not to cross any sensitive lines with MCE and thus did not include an auto commercial skip feature, which is something that is included in the latest ReplayTV PVRs. With MCE you can skip ahead 30 seconds at a time by hitting a button on the remote, but you cannot automatically skip all commercials. Hitting another button will rewind 7 seconds and the combination of the two buttons helps make flipping through commercials in your recorded shows quite easy.

The replay and skip buttons are pictured above.

This overlay is what you'll see when pausing, fast forwarding or rewinding while watching anything in MCE; it goes into hiding after a short amount of inactivity.

Page: 20 Watching Recorded TV

If you use MCE enough you'll end up having a nice collection of recorded shows, which Microsoft was kind enough to organize for you:

After you're done watching something you've recorded, MCE will ask you if you want to keep the recording, delete it or what else you would like to do with it. By default MCE will place all recorded shows in the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Recorded TV\ directory so you can share shows all over your network with ease.

As you can see from the menu on the left, this is also how you get to the recording errors screen that has a listing of all of the shows that weren't recorded and MCE's explanation for why they weren't.

One unofficial requirement for a good Media Center PC is a fast and powerful hard drive; in the storage settings menu you can configure how much of the disk you want to use for your recorded shows and what default quality you'd like to use.

Page: 21 So how well does it work?

The TV aspect of MCE is obviously its biggest selling point and thus the question on everyone's mind is how well it functions as a PVR.

We've already established that MCE's interface does a terrific job of competing with the likes of TiVo and ReplayTV, not to mention completely dominating anything we've seen from ATI and NVIDIA, but how well does the entire package function?

Although MCE is by far the best first attempt at a PVR we've seen from any company, it isn't without its very noticeable flaws; the most serious of which happens to be this issue of performance. On a 2.53GHz Pentium 4, CPU utilization hovers around 30 - 40% while simply watching TV; note that this is with a hardware MPEG-2 encoder card and a very fast Pentium 4 CPU. We tried performing our own clean MCE install on the setup, updated all of the drivers and walked away with nothing better. There are clearly some issues with MCE as it shouldn't require such a high speed CPU to perform simple MPEG-2 decoding and writing to the disk. The CPU utilization drops to below 20% if MCE is closed and it's just recording in the background, which isn't too bad but still higher than you'd expect for a hardware MPEG-2 encoding engine that isn't relying on the host CPU.

The high CPU utilization only really becomes a problem when you're doing other things in the background that also eat up a ton of CPU time, such as quickly flipping through the program guide or starting the guide up for the first time. As we mentioned before, this is mainly an issue with allowing other threads to compete with the TV encoding/decoding threads for CPU time. We can understand that Microsoft wants to let people use MCE as both a media center OS and as a regular OS for work and play, but there's no excuse for stuttering caused within the Media Center interface itself.

Then there's the issue of crashes; in its default configuration, the HP Media Center PC wasn't the most stable computer we've encountered. But after a clean install without much of the junk HP loads and with fully updated drivers, the system was much more reliable. Even with our reinstall, there have been cases where the Media Center application crashed, requiring a full system restart before functioning properly. Other times it just required us to close the Media Center application and reopen it before we were able to continue watching our TV. In the end the stability issues weren't too prevalent, but with a PVR any sort of crashes are unacceptable. It will be interesting to see if other hardware configurations would lead to more reliable Media Center PCs.

Other than the performance issues and occasional crash, MCE works quite well as a PVR, even eclipsing TiVo and ReplayTV in features, functionality and interface in some cases. Compared to other PC based PVR solutions, MCE's major advantage is its very polished user interface; whether it is ATI, NVIDIA or SnapStream, they can all perform the same basic functions as MCE but all lack the interface that will allow MCE to penetrate living rooms and truly make the PC seem like a set-top PVR. ATI comes the closest but without a truly immersive UI they cannot touch MCE in this respect, but from a functionality standpoint they can do just about everything MCE does already. The functionality of MCE isn't fundamentally new, it's just packaged in such a way that it can reach a much larger breadth of users.

Because the performance issues are directly tied to multiple threads of execution contending for CPU time, MCE may end up being best suited for use on a Hyper-Threading enabled Pentium 4. It may not be a coincidence that the first full year of MCE's availability will be the same year that Hyper-Threading fully transitions to mainstream desktop processors...

Page: 22 It also plays music...

Microsoft didn't just name their OS Media Center Edition for nothing, they truly wanted it to turn your PC into a media center. Going along with that definition, it's no surprise that MCE also has a very capable music interface built into it.

By selecting My Music from the main menu you'll be taken to a listing of all of the songs and albums in your library. But how do you get things into your library you ask? Unfortunately this is the biggest limitation of MCE's music interface as you can't just point at a list of your MP3s and have MCE categorize them for you; instead, you must use Windows Media Player and add the music you want to your library.

After you've selected the music you want to add to your library you then have to close and restart the Media Center application in order for it to see what you've added to your library. This is by far the most annoying part of letting MCE manage your music, but the ends do justify the means if you plan on hooking up your Media Center PC to your home theater system as you'll be able to have your entire music library available without leaving your couch.

Page: 23

Once you have added your entire music library you can use MCE's extensive search capabilities to help you find what you're looking for. Searching by genre is one option, the genres are taken from the ID3 tags of your MP3s so you'll want to make sure that they are correct:

You can also use MCE's keyword search:

Searching for a Paul Simon song we happened to find what we were looking for very quickly. The MCE search works very quickly and runs the search in real time, so as you type MCE will narrow the list of search results.

Keyword input is also done from the remote, and quite effectively/efficiently we might add. It's just like typing in characters into a cellphone, you hit the same number key multiple times to cycle through the three or four letters each number represents.

Page: 24

Once you've found the song you want, playing it will bring you to this screen; you can select an entire album to play or just one song, either way you'll be greeted with the same screen. If you hit the Media Center button on the remote (big green button) it will take you back to the main media center menu but your music will continue to play, what you're listening to will appear in the lower left hand corner as you can see from the screenshot above.

Here we have an entire track listing, the song with the icon to the right of its play length is what is currently being played. You can pause, fast forward and rewind through the song you're playing using the same controls you would for watching TV; the same overlay is used.

Other than the annoying issue of having to use Windows Media Player to add music to your library, MCE does a fine job of managing your music for you and making it easy to get to.

Page: 25 All the pretty pictures

The final feature we have to touch on is the picture library; the picture library is pretty simple, it's just a place for you to view all of your pictures by either flipping through them or through an automated slide show. It's useful for showing a large group of people pictures from a trip.

Cataloging your pictures is luckily just as simple as putting them in the appropriate directory; each folder you make will appear as a separate folder of pictures.

Once within a folder you'll be able to browse through all of the pictures in that folder, either manually or by playing a slide show of them all.

You can also have MCE catalogue all of your videos for you:

If you install the DiVX codec you can also playback all of your DiVX encoded movies through this interface as well.

Page: 26 The HP Media Center PC 873n

Although this review focused mainly on MCE, we would like to provide a quick look at the HP Media Center PC that we used for our tests.

The HP Media Center PC 873n comes with a 2.53GHz Pentium 4 on an 845G motherboard made by FIC with 512MB of DDR266 SDRAM. You'll also find a SB Audigy and 56K modem on the inside of the PC, along with onboard Ethernet. This particular configuration came with a DVD writer and a regular CD drive as well. The power button has a blue LED behind it that glows quite brightly, which can be a problem in a very dark room if you don't want to attract a ton of attention to the PC.

HP also bundles the system with a universal memory reader accessible from the front of the PC; the reader will accept SmartMedia, MMC/SD, Memory Stick and CompactFlash cards. It's too bad that MCE won't recognize a memory card with pictures on it and let you browse it in the Media Center interface. HP completes the package by bundling a set of Klipsch Promedia 2.1s with the machine.

There's nothing too special about the design or assembly of the PC, other than the fact that it is very quiet thanks to a large heatsink on the CPU and a large, slow spinning fan.

The system comes with a GeForce4 MX by default, which unfortunately means that the best video output you can get is via a S-Video cable; no component out here, not without upgrading the system yourself to an All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500/9700.

In order to prevent users from connecting anything to the onboard VGA connector (powered by the 845G graphics), HP covered up the port as you can see above.

Interestingly enough, HP doesn't ship the 873n with any sort of wireless keyboard or mouse. They are fully expecting you to work with the remote for anything media related and deal with a wired PS/2 keyboard and mouse for everything else.

The keyboard does have some useful controls on it, too bad it has a very short cable.

Page: 27 Final Words

With Windows XP Media Center Edition, Microsoft has proven their ability to bring a truly consumer-friendly OS down to the living room, or in the case of the first MCE boxes - the dorm room or apartment. People have had computers in their living rooms for years, but with MCE the PC can be put alongside a receiver or a TV and finally be at home.

As a PVR, Media Center Edition functions just as well as any TiVo or ReplayTV box, and is already miles ahead of anything currently available for the PC. But if you're buying a Media Center PC to use as nothing more than a PVR, then you're unnecessarily making one very expensive investment. You can get PVR functionality and identical capabilities out of any set-top box, for a quarter of the price of a decent Media Center PC. In order for MCE to really be a competitor to the TiVo and ReplayTVs of the world, it will have to be made available in a much cheaper form - potentially as an Xbox2 add-on.

What MCE does do quite well is exactly what Microsoft is targeting it at currently; for the dorm room or apartment where space is tight, MCE can easily transform a PC that would otherwise be used for work and games into a true media center. The important thing to keep in mind is that while MCE will transform a PC into a media center, it will not remove its ability to function as a normal XP Professional machine; this is exactly why it can do well in these niche markets where one machine for work, games and TV would be ideal.

There are a lot of improvements that must be made in order for MCE to really take off however; first and foremost, the performance issues we encountered are unacceptable. Unfortunately, it may take mainstream Hyper-Threading enabled Pentium 4s with an 800MHz FSB in order to mask the stuttering issues that occur during normal use of MCE as a PVR. As far as stability goes, we'd expect the limited number of hardware vendors to more thoroughly stress test and ensure their machines won't be crashing in a media center environment; like we've mentioned before, who wants to explain why their TV just blue screened?

In the end, Microsoft has done a splendid job with Windows XP Media Center Edition. It isn't perfect, and it definitely isn't for everyone but in going after the markets that it does tailor to, Microsoft has done well. Hopefully this will be the first of many steps in reaching this idea of digital convergence that Intel and Microsoft have been pushing for quite some time...

Personally I now prefer the integrated solution

[Mantrid]

I recently acquired a satellite system (DSS) with the PVR built-in (see my journal if you want to know more). Basically it just hooked up the same as the standard receiver. I've been using it for not quite a month and I just can't see going through the hassle of a media centre PC anymore. (I was looking at setting up something like that before - and being in Canada, I would have the added problem of finding a PVR that supports local satellite or cable options Guide-wise).

Basically, having a set-up like this 'just works'. You press pause and TV is paused. You select the program you want to record out of the program guide or program search and it records it (you can choose to protect it, to prevent other recordings overwriting on a full HDD, and you can choose to start recording 1 minute early). You can go back and watch something that you recorded while it records something else. Every time you change the channel it begins buffering again automatically (up to 1 hour I think). It can hold 30 hours of programming. It can IR-Blast the VCR if needed also.

I'm a PVR addict. Now I'm sure you can accomplish all of this and more using a PC with WMCE or whatever, but it's nice to not have a computer hanging around the room or having to show my wife how to get everything going. Sure I can't share with other PCs and I don't think it can really perform every trick that PC software or a TiVo can right now, but it does have an upgradeable BIOS. It is not hooked up to the internet or the phone line (if I ever bother with PPV then I'll have to use a phone line). I can tell the unit not to upgrade its BIOS without asking.

Basically, a home theatre setup often borders on messy anyways - throwing a PC into the mix just further confuses things.

And I definitely don't need a MS solution - don't need a BSOD messing up my TV viewing!

Re:Personally I now prefer the integrated solution

[stratjakt]

But,

Your typical PVR doesnt play DivX, DVD, Mp3, Ogg, etc, etc.

It doesn't surf the web.

It doesn't do miscellaneous user-defined stuff - ie; like connect my xbox to xbconnect so I can play Halo online.

It surely doesn't play games.

So it's really apples and oranges. If all you want is a PVR, by all means - get a PVR. If you want DVD playback, just get a DVD player.

The whole point, IMO, is to remove the mess of devices and wires. The mythical convergence beast. One machine sitting there to do it all.

I'm still trying to put together a good GUI for my own tweaked 'media' PC (still just an old emachine with a Radeon card with video out - more proof of concept), but it's pretty close to what I want. I wouldn't pay the price for one of these newer commercial units, but what I have is well worth the ~200 bucks I've sunk into it.

Frankly its MUCH easier to use than the Apex DVD player I have. Have you seen the remote controls on those things?

Re:Personally I now prefer the integrated solution

[/dev/trash]

Can you save recorded shows as VCDs to be burnt to CD?

Re:Personally I now prefer the integrated solution

[Neil Watson]

From his journal:

the watch one show while you record another is a bit deceptive: you can't say, watch something on channel 100 and record something on channel 200 as one might be led to believe.

Man I'd be raising hell with them if I were you. All this digital TV they plug and they can't even duplicate the functions of ananlog TV and a VCR.

Is there any digital server that will alow you to tape a broadcast from one channel while watching a broadcast on another channel?

Re:Personally I now prefer the integrated solution

[Greedo]

Too bad you don't allow comments in your journal. I too have the BEV PVR and love it. Two comments:

- The interactive weather isn't just Canadian cities, it's international

- One of the great features in the BEV PVR, and missing from the MS box is the UHF remote, which means my PVR can be in my basement, away from my TV.

- The IR thing that made you shit your pants ... cool eh? You can use an IR extender like this one (I think one came with my PVR), or just put your PVR near the VCR. The IR signal it sends out is strong enough. Doesn't apply to me, since my PVR is in the basement.

- I didn't know the 5100 was discontinued ... where did you see that? I just got some mail from Bell promoting it.

Now ... if I could only figure out what that weird "expansion port" is on the back, maybe I could read the recorded shows off the PVR and archive them.

Re:Personally I now prefer the integrated solution

[Greedo]

This is a limitation of most digital TV (cable or satellite). The STB can only decode one channel at a time, so you can only do something with one live channel.

You can get double LMB dishes, that provide two cables from the dish to the STB. None of the Bell STBs support two inputs, but you can buy another decoder for the second line for ~$99. Then you can record one show on the PVR and watch another on the other STB.

(STB=set-top box)

Re:Personally I now prefer the integrated solution

[Mantrid]

Huh, i thought I had comments on - I'll have to look.

The 5100 is apparently no longer discontinued, weird eh? I have heard there is an 80GB version though.

Not sure about the expansion port either!

Re:Personally I now prefer the integrated solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Maine, Time Warner just introduced DVR boxes from Scientific Atlanta (Explorer 8000) that can simultaneously record two shows at once, and store up to 40 hours of programming. Also does picture in picture, sorts by category and title, etc.

Re:Personally I now prefer the integrated solution

[Mike Bridge]

the directv w/ tivo (and ultimateTV) have 2 tuners built in the 1 set top box, so assuming you have a dual LNB dish and the correct splitter installed, you can watch 1 thing (already recorded) and record 2 things, all at the same time, on satellite (directv only at this time, dish seems content to not let others play in their sandbox), or watch 1 thing live and record another in the background, or constantly switch between 2 things recording at the same time (pause one when it goes to commercial, switch to other, watch til it gets to a commercial, switch back, fast forward thru to show, repeat)

I was almost thinking they might've won me over

[Miguelito]

Then I saw this:

Even with our reinstall, there have been cases where the Media Center application crashed, requiring a full system restart before functioning properly

I've got 2 Tivo's, both hacked, and neither has ever crashed or spontaneously rebooted on me (save one hang during first upgrade because I didn't disable write verify on the disks first.. my fault, I cut corners). There's no way in hell I'd trust a box that's not completely reliable to replace my trusty Tivos.

Ummm... But...

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

FTA:
"ATI's latest All-in-Wonder line comes extremely close; closer than any previous attempt, but ATI is still bound by the tragic flaw of a PC based PVR - the Windows interface."

This doesn't take a rocket scientist to add 2 and 2 in this case, does it?

Neat, Cool, So what.....

[FatRatBastard]

This kinda reminds me of the whole "new" tablet design. Yes the technology is great, but who the hell are going to buy them (en mass)?

TiVo (which I love, love, love) and ReplayTV aren't exactly setting the world on fire in terms of sales, so its not like there's a HUGE demand for these things. Also the price seems a hell of a lot higher than buying a functional computer and a TiVo seperately. How many people live in apartments so small they can't have both? College students are always bandied about for potential buyers, but my sense is that most would rather have a laptop. Plus, how many parents are going to plunk down that kind of money right after signing that check for school so their kids can record TV? I just don't think the cost would be justified (my dad would have laughed at me 'til he was blue in the face).

Nice tech, tiny market. MS better watch out. There only so many "these'll change the world" ideas that don't pan out that hardware companies are willing to subsidize.

Re:Neat, Cool, So what.....

[geekoid]

"Yes the technology is great, but who the hell are going to buy them "

I would. I would love to be able to afford about for of them, and a wireless connection.
That way, the other people in my house can use the system for small task they do often.
I dont want to stop playing so my wife can get a reciepe off the machine. There an "appplience' so it won't be another computer thing I have to maintian very often.

Yeah. Right.

[Anonymous Coward]

>operating system. AnandTech's review has got everything you could
want, including pictures galore. It looks like the folks who make the
Linux based Video Disk Recorder have a new standard to live up to."
>
>
Only if you want a DRM-encumbered system, that is.....

Do I really want this?

[Beebos]

Do I really want my PC recording The Simposons while I play Unreal Tournament 2003?

I don't think so! I have a 3.06 P4 with an ATI 9700 and its pretty much maxed out while playing UT 2003. I bet them same will be true with the upcoming Doom title.

I'd much rather have my Replay 4500s doing their recording thing while I'm doing my computing/gaming thing.

You can get two or three Replays for the price of a Media Center PC, I think. You can hook them up to your network and share programing between them, your PCs and friends on the net. And they won't steel CPU cycles from your PC.

Re:Do I really want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have only one PC?

And the replay 4xxx agreement contains a clause that they are able to remove any feature they want after you bought the device... Usually the features you like are the ones that the MPAA doesn't. It's just a matter of time.

Re:Do I really want this?

[cybrthng]

With media center you can run tools like Dscaler to do stuff that costs 2500.00 :)

It takes WEEKS to build your own pc with these capabilities, i think price/performance is awesom with these units and if it breaks you have a single vendor to deal with.

Nightmare trying to build you own!

Re:Do I really want this?

[jkczyz]

Perhaps you should read the article first. This page in particular.

Re:Do I really want this?

[Beebos]

What is your point?

Re:Do I really want this?

[jkczyz]

My point is that by requiring "TV tuner cards that handle MPEG-2 encode entirely in hardware," you can play Unreal Tournament 2003 to your hearts content and still record the Simpsons without a problem. Maybe I'm just not understanding the article, but either way the recommended processor requirement for UT 2003 is P3 1.0 GHz or better. So I think your machine could handle a little extra load.

Re:Do I really want this?

[robosmurf]

In the article it states that there is significant cpu usage for recording shows even when done in the background with the MCE closed.

They also stated that the recording sometimes stuttered when under heavy load.

This does seem to rather ruin the whole point, if you have to restrict you usage of the pc to avoid damaging the recording.

Re:Do I really want this?

[jkczyz]

I hate to beat a dead horse, but that is exactly what requiring a TV tuner card which does not pass its work off to the CPU is meant to prevent. That was the solution to the above mentioned problem.

As far a stuttering goes, that was mentioned as problem when recording and watching a show simultaneously AND while using a card that did not meet the media center's requirements. Namely that the tuner card must not pass any of its work off to the processor.

Re:Do I really want this?

[Beebos]

I saw that, but just because the encoding is being done without thae cpu, doesn't mean that system reasources aren't being used. The PC still has to constantly write the data to disk and organize the recording schedule. That is going to give you a perfomance hit.

I'm not going to mention how much a giggle I got out the idea of playing UT 2003 with a P3 1.0 gig gave me. Ooops, I guess I did.

In the mean time...

[Lendrick]

...you can purcase Windows XP Media Center Second Edition starting Febrary 1st, for the low low price of $149.95 plus tax.

Re:In the mean time...

[JebusIsLord]

Really? where did you hear that? I'm actually rather excited about it - sorry everyone. My other box is running linux from scratch, serious!

Re:Lack of GENERAL support

[dabraun]

READ the info on this. You can not buy the software. You can only get it along with a new PC. The lack of support for a wide range of hardware (the complications which that would create esp. with non-hardware compression like ATI) is one of the reasons they must have chosen the OEM-only route.

Need faster processors? Whatever...

[GusherJizmac]

An interesting quote from the article

"Whenever AMD or Intel release a new CPU, everyone asks the question what we need faster processors for? The most common response for that is "to enable future applications" and a couple of years ago, there was enough processing power in a cheap enough form to finally give the VCR a brain - the idea of a set-top Personal Video Recorder (PVR) was born."

"Although MCE is by far the best first attempt at a PVR we've seen from any company, it isn't without its very noticeable flaws; the most serious of which happens to be this issue of performance. On a 2.53GHz Pentium 4, CPU utilization hovers around 30 - 40% while simply watching TV; note that this is with a hardware MPEG-2 encoder card and a very fast Pentium 4 CPU. We tried performing our own clean MCE install on the setup, updated all of the drivers and walked away with nothing better. There are clearly some issues with MCE as it shouldn't require such a high speed CPU to perform simple MPEG-2 decoding and writing to the disk. The CPU utilization drops to below 20% if MCE is closed and it's just recording in the background, which isn't too bad but still higher than you'd expect for a hardware MPEG-2 encoding engine that isn't relying on the host CPU.

The Tivo uses a 75Mhz PowerPC, which was available many years ago and is a joke of a processor right now. It's also what enables Tivo to not cost $1000. The fact that this windows media center slows down noticable with a 2.xx Ghz P4 is embarassing. Tivo rarely exhibits any slowdown, and it's not only using a alledgely more inferior PowerPC processor, but one from several years ago running at 3% of the speed of this thing.

What a shameless MS plug

[ajs]

This article (not the Slashdot article, but the review referenced) is really going around itself to lap up the MS PR releases here. First off, it never once questions why you would want this thing in preference to a TiVo or Replay. It does bring up the "advantage" of PC-based PVRs. Apparently it's the ability to convert your stored shows to any format you like... of course, they then explain that MCE can't do that, but they expect that MS will add it soon!

They also skip right over any discussion of ease of use, setup, cabling, access to guide data, fees, etc. I'm assuming that the author simply read some releases, watched a couple of Simpsons episodes and then decided to write a review (mostly of the Simpsons, as it turns out).

Oh, and I'm assuming that the assertion that this will be WindowsXP/Pro + MCE is a joke. I can't imagine that MS won't lock all of the "server" features in this, just like they do with XP/Home.

Re:MS wins again

[BarrettAnderson]

that's not what it says for me. for me it says With Microsoft's clout and programming ability, this product will be nothing less than top notch.

where in that does it say open source software is never top notch?

Only works with 2 cards

[prisoner]

and that is crap. The ATI & nvidia cards aren't supported. This is too bad.

uh oh

[RyLaN]

so what do we all do, when watching "the simpsons" (to quote the article) and our box gets 0wn3d? count the number of days before script kiddies have a script to pipe specific (obscene) images/sound onto your tvs..just what microsoft wants grandma and kids to see huh?

Thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have come to expect unbiased reviews and comments from the Slashdot community, especially regarding Microsoft!

or you could try DAVE/DINA

[fons]

Dave/Dina is similar to MythTV

At the moment MythTV has beter TV-options, better layout and a better logo :-)

DaveDina has more AUDIO options, at the moment.

The ASF wrapper also currently prevents transcodin

[t0qer]

The ASF wrapper also currently prevents transcoding into other media formats, such as DiVX.

No it doesn't :)

This could be better than a TiVo

[twfry]

First off, before I get flamed, I want so say that I have had a TiVo for a few years now and love the thing as a child.

But the main problem with it is I can't play Divx4 movies on TiVo. I have a server upstairs with a whole bunch of movies as divx4 *.avi files. My Tivo is on the network but still can't play them.

However if I put a box behind the TV with MS media stuff, then I could play them. Hmmmm.... Maybe its time to make another purchase.

Nothing like cutting each page into 5 paragraph's

[SensitiveMale]

to raise the fucking hit counts and show more ads.

Any particular reason this story couldn't of been 5 to 8 pages at the most?

I just had a vision of the future

[nicodaemos]

A new Outlook virus is running rampant and now, in addition to infecting your computer and propagating itself through your email, it deletes all references to itself from both your email and any news programs you might be watching -- even the live ones!

Essentially the humans would have to go back to voice communication to know what was going on.

Re:I just had a vision of the future

[nicodaemos]

Okay I just had another vision -- man, perhaps I really do need more fiber in my diet. Whatever.

Anyway, imagine the power of controlling a media center pc. All kinds of information flowing through that one device would just be too tempting to attack and manipulate. Imagine rewriting email messages, rewording web pages or even altering news broadcasts to be more favorable to your corporation. How many people get most (if not all) of their news from the internet and tv? Talk about a serious chokepoint to control information dispersal.

Kinda scary if you ask me.

Re:I just had a vision of the future

[Planesdragon]

Talk about a serious chokepoint to control information dispersal.

Not really. Any sizeable alteration of news is news--and thus, the hypothetical Media-Monopoly would get perhaps a day before it was shut down. And as for a cracking standpoint--well, you'd have to get each box individually, which won't be any easier than it is today.

It's much cheaper, btw, to simply manage misinformation with a skilled marketer and an on-staff lawyer. Legal, too.

Evidence?

[Anonymous Coward]

greechneb, prove it.

I'll even accept a packet sniff that said that the machine in question was touching the outside world during any file search regardless of where the connection was being made to. Doesn't even have to be phoning home... could be phoning anywhere and I'll believe your paranoia is justified.

Until then, I'm calling bullshit on your FUD.

Re:Evidence?

[greechneb]

Bullshit? Read this: http://www.theregus.com/content/4/24611.html

Re:Evidence?

[MisterFancypants]

The article is quite clear that local file searches do NOT send information back to Microsoft. They merely do a file update of some files the search program references, if needed. They do not send your file search information back to Microsoft. How many tinfoil hats do you have, Mr Paranoid man?

Re:Evidence?

[supradave]

Let me come to your house with my dog. I'll wait at the door and let my dog leave a couple of [pf]iles for you.

That's the problem with Microsoft. They think they can connect their products back home anytime. Be like a car being remotely commandeered to go back to the shop at random intervals. Why is it any of MS business what you do with your internet (not their internet).

Re:Evidence?

[Vicegrip]

Actually, another example of XP dialing home without asking for permission happened to me with a digital camera. The first time I plugged it in, zone alarm immeadiately posted a warning that a process was attempting to connect to an IP I didn't recognize (I then resolved it to a MS Windows Update site... I could dig up the ip again if somebody wants it).

Anyways, it downloaded the appropriate driver for the Fuji f401 but I was extremely perplexed about why the OS didn't ask for permission first or even notify that this was happening. I would have missed it without Zone Alarm notifying me of it.

That whole OS leaves with me all kinds of queasy feelings about what it does or doesn't do on the net behind my back.

Re:Evidence?

[earplug]

Says a lot about your looks eh? :)

Re:Evidence?

[Alsee]

The article is quite clear that local file searches do NOT send information back to Microsoft.

True, but Microsoft can change that at will, and the article makes it abundantly clear that it DOES send info back when you do any non-local search.

It's none of Microsoft's freaking bussiness wheather I search for "AIDS treatments", "chicks-with-dicks", or "plastic explosives".

Microsoft tags your machine with ID code, and it tags almost everything you do with a GUID - globally unique ID code - that is linked to the machine code. This has even bitten Microsoft in the ass a few times - every document contains the GUID and some files have been traced back to a specific Microsoft employee in some very embarrasing cases.

Search Assistant connects back to Microsoft servers because THEY want it to, NOT because you want it to. Microsoft stopped designing "features" for the customers benefit and started designing them for their own benefit a long time ago. The only reason they get away with it is because of their monopoly market position. If there was any serious competition people simply wouldn't buy products with "features" like DRM, SAP, and privacy invasion.

-

Re:Evidence?

[CyPlasm]

Does anyone have a list of ip's/dns names of sites that WinXP or Win2K connect to by themselves?

Re: linux troll?

[stratjakt]

>> The fact that you seem unable to grasp the basic notion that M$ servers have a reputation for needing constant reboots is sad (for you).

I grasp the 'notion of a reputation', but I also know that it doesn't relate to the real world.

Linux also has a reputation for poor hardware support and second rate performance when it comes to the video/gui arena.

Acclaim earned a reputation for making really shitty games back in the NES days. So what?

Comparing the latest linux build to NT 3.51 is getting really old.

My 7 year old analogy applies perfectly. She uses a TV as her primary display, and watches DVDs and a small library of cartoons in divx off my fileserver (which runs linux, btw, because that's what I find linux appropriate for) I find this much closer to the function of these machines than an ecommerce server.

And people pointing to Tux Racer as if it validates linux as an entertainment/gaming platform *is* a joke.

Re:Need faster processors? Whatever...

[fitten]

Yeah, I dunno wtf the stuff is doing using that much host CPU. At least in the TiVo, the PPC is just there to run the user interface and stuff and probably set up DMA transfers or shovel data to/from the disc at the most. I would figure something similar would be the case with this thing... guess not.

Re:MS wins again

[Eric Damron]

The "Linux and MacOS won't be able to compete with this." part was an unnecessary jab at Linux and MacOS.

Do Not Remove

[sfe_software]

This is a bit OT, but why did HP put a "Do Not Remove" cap over the on-board VGA connector? There are perfectly valid reasons to run multiple monitors (especially on a "Media PC"), and there doesn't seem to be any reason to cap the connector off...

Obviously the GeForce is a better card, but... why use a board with onboard video, just to cap it off? Seems like a hack to me; perhaps a driver conflict caused concern, so they disabled it in the BIOS and capped it off.. but it's very unprofessional IMO.

Just a nitpick I guess...

Re:Do Not Remove

[Moofie]

Because it's HP, and HP is the devil. They're evil evil evilevilevil, and they hate every single person who's ever bought one of their computers with the loathing of one thousand, uh, loathes.

Or maybe I just hate trying to fix 'em. Not sure if I'm biased.

: )

Re:Do Not Remove

[SamNmaX]

Assuming the onboard card is AGP, I don't think you can have two AGP cards at the same time. They probably capped it so that people don't try connecting the monitor into a port that's been disabled. I imagine if you really wanted to you could remove the Geforce, enable the onboard card, and remove the cover on the VGA slot, there's very little reason to do that.

Re:Do Not Remove

[UnixRevolution]

I believe the question here is "why didn't they use a board that hasn't got onboard VGA in an effort to save money?", not "why can't i use both connectors at once?"

The answers for the latter question that have been put forth are very good. those for the former are nonexistant, so here goes.

PEOPLE ARE FUCKING STUPID!#(%&!#(*%&)!

i believe that should clear up any confusion.

How is this informative?

[Anonymous Coward]

You zealots will swallow anything.

MODS ON CRACK

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a thought, geniuses: instead of modding me a troll, how about posting a follow-up explaining WHY you think I'm trolling? Be sure to cite any resources that suggest that MS's intentions with Windows XP's product-activation and upcoming Palladium "features" are anything other than dishonorable and anti-consumer.

Re:MODS ON CRACK

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just a missunderstanding. See so many of the trolls have been modded up as insightful lately that they've collected vast reserves of karma. When they were selected as moderators, they misunderstood and incorrectly assumed slashdot upgraded to sport so sort of autoposting feature. Naturally some selected 'troll' to see what an autotroll by slashdot would look like. Some, due to their dyslexia, picked overrated, which they inadvertantly read as overplayed, so they might see what the latest Soviet Russia jokes looked like etc. And they never even saw the moderate button. All those years of using lynx have taken their toll, they just so used to hitting return.

Re:Need faster processors? Whatever...

[ilsie]

Tivo rarely exhibits any slowdown

You ever try to reorganize 34 season passes? It takes about 10 minutes.

Re:Need faster processors? Whatever...

[SensitiveMale]

I can tell you exactly why.

Tivo uses several DSPs to handle the audio and video.

MCE does everything through software which, in technical terms "sucks ass".

This is just another way ms shoots themselves in the foot by forcing everything through windows.

Re:MS wins again

[tmbailey123]

Who would want a PVR from a company that can't even manage their own network
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/01/0 8/techweb .microsoft.outage1/index.html

Re:Lack of GENERAL support

[dewboy]

You're right - you have to go the OEM route if you want this PVR OS - but ianjk is right when it comes to the options facing the consumer:

1) Get one of these OEM boxes - special PC with specific graphics hardware and PVR OS (time, hassle, money)
2) Buy a set-top box for 1/4 the price (simplicity)

As the article states, unless the end user is going to use the PC for more than just a PVR, he'd be much better off getting a set-top box.

Re:Lack of GENERAL support

[ianjk]

I didn't catch that. Now it makes more sense. Having to buy a 2.53 ghz box for $1,649.00 to get this OS is still not that apealing. Especially if it is unstable out of the box.

Truly, these are the end times

[Wee]

Rev. 6:12.5: "And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood, and Mig forsook all that was TiVo."

-B

Re:Truly, these are the end times

[Miguelito]

Heh.. what can I say? I'm spoiled. I'm so used to the Tivo always working that I hate "live" tv now. I've even caught myself (on the rare occasion that I watch something live... usually news, TLC or History) trying to fast forward into the future. Damn the laws of physics and time!

Re:Truly, these are the end times

[Wee]

Yeah, Todd's told me all about your TiVo predilection. He says that you're pretty much The Man when it comes to TiVo stuff. And I've caught myself trying to fast forward as well. It's scary.

I don't know if I mentioned this, but I also got an old series 1 TiVo (my brother bought one when they first came out). The HDD is pretty much toast, and I wanna hack it up. Put two really large drives in it, etc. I need to get hat ethernet deal those dudes sell. I'll probably be bugging you at some point... :-)

-B

No but it's out for download

[Anonymous Coward]

But the features/issues are still the same. Have to get one of the two cards supported and then it still locks u into MS's friggin ASF codec. Ya someone will hack it but it's totally stupid that they should have too.

Re:No but it's out for download

[Abcd1234]

Erm... last I checked, mplayer is perfectly capable of playing ASFs out (using the Windows DLLs)... perhaps you are referring to something over and above this? Additional DRM features that I haven't run into yet, perhaps?

Re:MS wins again

[Eric Damron]

What an intelligent person full of bright ideas. You sir are a real assssssset to the slashdot community!

Why do you need all this?

[Gothmolly]

Try checking out that big room outside the server room, you know, the one where the ceiling is sometimes blue, and sometimes black with little white lights, and the A/C sucks.

Re:Why do you need all this?

[NetJunkie]

I have a great life outside my tech gear. I don't think the things I mentioned were much. Just some of the Replay features along with HD support. My TV is HD. My digital cable does HD. My TiVo doesn't and it causes some problems since I had to set up my remote to switch back and forth inputs to make it all easy to use.

Offtopic: Re:Do Not Remove

[glenstar]

Do you realize that you are wasting 100 precious bytes in your signature?

Mind you, I felt inclinded to post this even though it will undo my moderations. I guess my wife is right... I am a no-good geek. ;-)

Re:Offtopic: Re:Do Not Remove

[Anonymous Coward]

disable .sigs and quit whining. NOW who's the geek?

TOS: Only 44 Pages!

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Before you can proceed in the program guide setup you have to scroll through the 44 pages of the Terms of Service and select agree. Once again, this is done fairly quickly using the remote just by holding the down-arrow and then hitting ok.

Gee Anand, don't strain your eyes there! :)

Re:Need faster processors? Whatever...

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA; MCE uses hardware compression just like Tivo.

ah, you got me

[istar]

MCSE doesnt impress me :) But I could very well be misinformed and have this be on my fault. Being a BSD user moreso than windows I could very well be mistaken from top to bottom.

Thanks for pointing that out though (corrections), when I did the network support for MS tech they told us to treat it like a 98 machine attempting to behave like an NT machine. That was applied to all versions before XP. Hm.. guess there was a sense of bias with the admin that was teaching us. Well, guess you learn something new each day. Bah, that is what I get for sticking my nose out of the BSD door.

Re:Need faster processors? Whatever...

[GusherJizmac]

I don't really count that, because TiVo knows it will take a while and tells you. What the article was talking about was the UI slowing down at times w/out warning. While both do suck, I'd rather know that I need to wait and do all the waiting at one time, rather than wait on a slow interface....

Re:Need faster processors? Whatever...

[dasuridai]

I have this same problem with using my tv tuner card. It runs fast and smooth under gentoo linux, but the whole computer slows down if I try to watch tv in windows 2000.

Re:Lack of GENERAL support

[rbgaynor]

Is it just me or did anyone else see PVR OS in the parent post and read it as POS?

Different context

[cyberformer]

Maybe the article is referring to capabilities, not processing speed. A PC can, in theory, perform an infinite number of different tasks. A PVR (like any other specialized device) is restricted to a few.

Re:Different context

[horza]

Maybe the article is referring to capabilities, not processing speed. A PC can, in theory, perform an infinite number of different tasks. A PVR (like any other specialized device) is restricted to a few.

All computers have a finite instruction set and finite memory in which to store information, therefore cannot in theory perform infinite number of tasks.

Phillip.

Re:Different context

[iawia]

Oh no! Somebody resurrect and tell turing!

Re:Different context

[demon]

Try actually learning about what Turing said regarding computational models, please. The only case where he referred to infinite operations is with a theoretically infinite memory. For practical purposes, as soon as you're dealing with things grounded in the _finite_ universe, that goes out the window.

Strange modding here...

[ryman]

What the heck? Who are MSFTards who modded this guys post? Hmmm...Microsoft XP Media Center Edition...watching TV on your PC...Digital Rights Management...this guy's not trolling, he's got a valid (and very ontopic) concern here. If there's any justice, the mods will get metamoderated into oblivion.

But...

[labratuk]

you forgot to mention the best (IMHO) PVR software project,

MythTV!

Re:Lack of GENERAL support

[spruce]

Especially if it is unstable out of the box.

That's actually the reason they're only allowing 6 different companies to sell Media Center PC's. They don't want the brand name to get tarnished by cheap PC's.

I run XP and it has never crashed - apps have crashed but that's it. Since this is a streamlined version of XP that is to run on a certain set of hardware, I'd be pretty confident that it won't crash. Yea I know what most people here will say about that.

This anti-MS chick at work told me I was a fool with blind faith for buying an XBOX - said it would crash all the time. It's been fine.

Re:Need faster processors? Whatever...

[mcowger]

I was going to mod you down, but decided to respond. Had you read the article, you would know that part of MS's REQUIREMENTS for producing a MCE is that they have hardware MPEG2 encoding on the tuner card.

I recognize that performance issues are unacceptable, the article seems to suggest they are due to poor coding of the guide scrolling system rather than design of the encode-stream.

Re:MS wins again

[swordboy]

So long, OS X and whatever media packages are available for Linux, it was nice knowing you.

ShowShifter.

It is the only PCTV software package available that does not 1) include spyware 2) include DRM or 3) require the use of a keyboard to gain *all* functionality. Although HDTV support isn't there yet, there are deinterlacing plug-ins available for progressive display of non-HDTV content.

If people would lobby them into Linux support, you could build your own Tivo for very little. And you get all of the benefits of open video format standards...

Is this Apple or Microsoft?

[1000101]

"As you can guess, you can't go out and buy Windows XP Media Center Edition; Microsoft's reasoning behind this is that they don't want a handful of "low-cost" or flawed implementations out on the market giving MCE a bad name. If Microsoft is to be taken seriously in the PVR market, MCE must be very competitive with both set-top and currently available PC solutions; poorly made Media Center PCs could seriously tarnish the brand and would work against Microsoft's success.
"

control the software AND the hardware. sounds like a mac to me

Re:Is this Apple or Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, it's M$.

Steve says, "Apple doesn't do set top boxes."

TiVo does, though. And they announced at Macworld SF that they're going to have a Rendezvous-enabled TiVo that can transfer video to a Mac or play music from the Mac through your home theater receiver(or whatever you plug it into, I guess). I think it uses Firewire, but I could be wrong on that one.

Re:Is this Apple or Microsoft?

[UnixRevolution]

If Microsoft is to be taken seriously in the PVR market, MCE must be very competitive with both set-top and currently available PC solutions; poorly made Media Center PCs could seriously tarnish the brand and would work against Microsoft's success..

BWAHAHHAAHAHAHHAHH
ahem. Anyway, as i was about to say...it's not like inferior quality is really something Micros~1 has ever worried about. Just ask mister Jobs^H^H^H^HGates.

Re:The ASF wrapper also currently prevents transco

[Abcd1234]

Not to mention that MPlayer can play ASFs, and hence has no trouble a) transcoding them or b) outputting them so you can transcode them using other tools (like mjpegtools). I've done this myself to convert ASFs to VCD-compatible MPEG-1 streams.

Re:Lack of GENERAL support

[Anonymous Coward]

From the review:

Then there's the issue of crashes; in its default configuration, the HP Media Center PC wasn't the most stable computer we've encountered. But after a clean install without much of the junk HP loads and with fully updated drivers, the system was much more reliable. Even with our reinstall, there have been cases where the Media Center application crashed, requiring a full system restart before functioning properly. Other times it just required us to close the Media Center application and reopen it before we were able to continue watching our TV.

"Media center" edition? "Media Center PC"?

[Kourino]

Okay, I'll give you that I live under a rock (kernel hacking for one class and dealing with the other classes has been my life for the past few months), but I have a few questions ...

Why the "new operating system" tag? This seems no more a new OS version than (say) Plus! was. Even Microsoft calls XPMCE a "new member of the Windows XP family". This isn't even a step from 95 to 98 as I understand it. :)

Second, what's so special about XPMCE? Other than it's designed to run on a Media Center PC. On that topic, does that mean that the only thing special about this version is that it will only run on machines that label themselves Media Center PCs? I ask because Microsoft's FAQ page says ...

Q.Can I just buy the Windows XP Media Center Edition system software and install it on my current machine?
A. No. Windows XP Media Center Edition is only available on a new kind of PC, called a Media Center PC. Media Center PCs provide the best of home computing and entertainment, and are built by Microsoft's partner PC manufacturers. The operating system software is not available as a stand-alone product, and a custom Media Center PC cannot be built at this time with off-the-shelf products.

So. What entails a Media Center PC, if you can't buy one off with OTS components? Cause I know you sure as hell can get "powerful processors, high-capacity hard disks, CD-ROM/DVD drives, and rich graphics and audio capabilities ... a remote control, [and a] TV tuner card" off the shelf.

Something smells fishy.

Yikes! Huge file sizes!

[McSpew]

Any TiVo owner will immediately spot this little issue: namely, that 93GB of disk space equals 5 hours 8 minutes of record time at best quality. Even if the space available for PVR functions is 75% of 93GB (as implied in the screenshot), that's still about five hours for 70GB of disk space.

Maybe MCE's definition of "best" quality is dramatically higher than TiVo's, but TiVo can store about 9 hours at "best" quality on a 30GB HD. On a machine with 70GB of disk space, it would easily be able to record over 20 hours at best quality. Why can MCE only squeeze a quarter as much video onto the same amount of space?

Also, I find it ironic that MCE has such grievous hardware requirements. It requires a TV tuner card with hardware MPEG-2 encoding, yet still requires a really fast CPU, fast RAM and a fast, big hard drive. Admittedly, TiVo's aren't sharing their hardware with other apps (in most cases), but first-generation TiVos managed to squeak by with a 50MHz PowerPC and 4400RPM hard drives. Surely, MS can squeeze stutter-free performance out of moderately powerful CPUs and HDs, can't they?

Re:Lack of GENERAL support

[ianjk]

I run XP and it has never crashed - apps have crashed but that's it. Since this is a streamlined version of XP that is to run on a certain set of hardware, I'd be pretty confident that it won't crash

the hp media center pc was unstable out of the box.

The "Mom" test

[dprice]

Looking through the Media PC screenshots, it looks somewhat more complex to use than Tivo, which I love dearly. Unfortunately Tivo does not pass the "Mom" test, and the Media PC is even worse. The plethora of buttons on the Media PC remote also looks like it would not pass the Mom test.

Basically, if I sat my Mom in front of a device, and if she can figure out how to use it, it passes the Mom test. I think she represents the non-tech-savvy user which is the majority of the population. She is able to use email and web browsing on her Mac, and she can program her VCR, but I don't think she would have the patience to deal with programming a Tivo or Media PC. If it has too many buttons and menu screens, it fails the test.

I would be impressed if someone came out with a low cost and very intuitive PVR/multimedia device that could sell to the common man. The raw technology is there to make all kinds of feature-rich devices, but there needs to be some serious attention paid to the user interface and useability if the devices are to be successful.

Use the "Print this article" link

[Kevinb]

Brings up the whole thing in one window. It makes reading the article much less painful.

Re:Yikes! Huge file sizes!

[cayenne8]

The extra room on the drive is probably taken up by that 'nifty' little wrapper (.asf?) that MS is putting around the files...no telling what all is in that. And it seems to add a nice little bonus that you can't transcode it to another format (divx), nor play it with a a non-Windows Media format type player....

So what?

[tryfan]

File it with the Smart Homes and Smart Cars. Interesting but irrelevant.

a PVR that "stutters" and "crashes"

[KaMiKa-Z77]

Don't ya just love honest reviews?

Although MCE is by far the best first attempt at a PVR we've seen from any company, it isn't without its very noticeable flaws; the most serious of which happens to be this issue of performance. On a 2.53GHz Pentium 4, CPU utilization hovers around 30 - 40% while simply watching TV; note that this is with a hardware MPEG-2 encoder card and a very fast Pentium 4 CPU. We tried performing our own clean MCE install on the setup, updated all of the drivers and walked away with nothing better. There are clearly some issues with MCE as it shouldn't require such a high speed CPU to perform simple MPEG-2 decoding and writing to the disk. The CPU utilization drops to below 20% if MCE is closed and it's just recording in the background, which isn't too bad but still higher than you'd expect for a hardware MPEG-2 encoding engine that isn't relying on the host CPU.
The high CPU utilization only really becomes a problem when you're doing other things in the background that also eat up a ton of CPU time, such as quickly flipping through the program guide or starting the guide up for the first time. As we mentioned before, this is mainly an issue with allowing other threads to compete with the TV encoding/decoding threads for CPU time. We can understand that Microsoft wants to let people use MCE as both a media center OS and as a regular OS for work and play, but there's no excuse for stuttering caused within the Media Center interface itself.
Then there's the issue of crashes; in its default configuration, the HP Media Center PC wasn't the most stable computer we've encountered. But after a clean install without much of the junk HP loads and with fully updated drivers, the system was much more reliable. Even with our reinstall, there have been cases where the Media Center application crashed, requiring a full system restart before functioning properly. Other times it just required us to close the Media Center application and reopen it before we were able to continue watching our TV. In the end the stability issues weren't too prevalent, but with a PVR any sort of crashes are unacceptable. It will be interesting to see if other hardware configurations would lead to more reliable Media Center PCs.
Other than the performance issues and occasional crash, MCE works quite well as a PVR...

This product is a joke..

[kryptkpr]

From the review (important parts bolded):

The guide is easy to navigate through and scroll speed is quite fast. The one thing that is worth noting that even on the HP's default Pentium 4 2.53GHz, CPU utilization can reach very high levels while scrolling through the list. Sometimes scrolling through the guide can cause the TV encoding process to stutter which is definitely unfortunate as stuttering isn't nearly this common with set-top PVRs. The problem here seems to be an issue with prioritizing threads, as the TV encode/decode threads should take absolute priority over any other threads contending for CPU time - especially those required to scroll through the program guide. ....

The first time the guide starts up, resource usage also pikes which will sometimes cause the TV encoding process to stutter as well. What you may find yourself doing is making sure you don't start up the guide while you're recording anything important as the stutters will be recorded to disk.

So, a 2.53 Ghz P4 can't handle opening the guide and scrolling through it? I have to make sure I'm not recording anything important while using the guide? Can M$ possibly get any more inefficient? Don't forget, this is with HARDWARE MPEG2! I wondered at first why cards without hardware MPEG2 codecs weren't supported.. now I understand.

Re:This product is a joke..

[kryptkpr]

I just tried this under Win2000, and I have to scroll up/down like a MANIAC to get it to hit 90% CPU Usage (this is on a XP1800+ running at 1.15Ghz, need better RAM) with a full-screen IE5.5 on a CPU that's barely half as powerful as the one in these beasts. Scrolling in Outlook Express however (so basically IE5.5 in a smaller window) seems to max the CPU out at 40%, no matter how hard I try.

As an interesting note, scrolling in other programs, such as Total Commander, Notepad or even WordPad (opened a large file, changed a bunch of fonts around randomly, still nothing), does not take any noticable CPU time... Hmm, this CPU-hogging seems to be an IE issue, maybe they're using IE to display the guide?

The article also notes that the slow down does not happen when scrolling sideways in the guide (through time), only up/down (through channels) ... go figure.

More ...

[Kourino]

Okay, somehow I got really stupid and forgot that parent was a review of said XPMCE ... sorry for the slashbotting. I usually play much nicer :3

But ... having read the article, it says " ... if you strip away the Media Center part of the equation you will be left with a fully functional copy of Windows XP Professional. What Media Center adds to the OS is primarily support for the Media Center application, which appears as nothing more than a regular program in your Start Menu."

Great. So for a Media Center PC I'm paying for Microsoft to add another program to my Start Menu? With an "incredible interface" no less ... but really. So it knows how to talk to a TV card. Whee. Actually, the program UI looks nice, but if we could get one of these MPEG TV cards with open standards (good luck!) I think an equivalent could be made. Especially one better integrating the music bits.

So. "Media Center" PCs require TV cards that do onboard MPEG-2 encoding. Can't I get those now? Granted, there are, what, two of them? But still. Nothing's stopping ATI from liscensing a hardware MPEG-2 solution from someone. Hell, if they'd do that and let the driver toggle MPEG-2 encoding it'd be great. That should be more a message to ATI and NVidia to stop complaining about MS' move in this case and make more advanced products. Sheesh.

One thing about the article. MPEG-2 isn't "bloated". It's different. (I know, but bear with me a moment ... ) MPEG-1 was designed for high-bandwidth, high-quality applications. MPEG-2 was designed for lower-bandwidth. MPEG-4 is for even lower-bandwidth applications. I assume that the lower the bandwidth, the higher the time complexity of the encoder. (Decoders are supposed to be relatively simple.) Lo, this is what speaketh the MPEG Standards. So encoding TV to MPEG-2 seems reasonable. Good to know Anandtech knows MPEG. :P

The article calls the decision to require onboard MPEG-2 encoding in its TV-card "unique". ... I think it makes sense for a consumer product. I think it makes MORE sense than limiting who can make Media Center PCs. But hey, I'm not Microsoft. I also was somewhat disappointed that, while they found that the performance even under idle load was "unacceptable", their solution was essentially to say "Microsoft, wait for HyperThreading CPUs" instead of "Microsoft, optimize your code".

Hehehe ... for all the times I've seen someone tell other people "don't irc as root" on opn ... "Don't watch TV as the Administrator!"

The picture of the screwed-over VGA connector was good for a laugh ... "DO NOT REMOVE". :3

Re:Need faster processors? Whatever...

[Kourino]

Uhhhh, no. MCE does [claim to] require a TV card that does its own MPEG-2 encoding.

<span style="flavor: conspiracy-theory;">Although, it wouldn't surprise me too much if they don't actually use it for the first release, then turn it on, come back, and say "Oh look! This release of MCE is so much faster than the first one. Won't you upgrade ... ?"</span>

Seriously though. The article says it uses MPEG-2 onboard the TV-in card. The article, in fact, makes a big deal about it and says that ATI and NVidia are complaining about it. So next time you should probably read the article :) Although yes, doing stuff in software generally sucks if there's a hardware solution.

if only...

[johnnyfever]

I could get tv-out on my Radeon 8500dv to work under Linux, I wouldn't even be reading this! Anyone got it to work? I've tried gatos to no avail....

Re:Lack of GENERAL support

[Moofie]

Well, whatever people around here might think, the article says that the HP PC crashed a couple times before they reinstalled from the ground up.

So, well, I guess you're not right.

Why this is a Good Thing(TM).

[SectoidRandom]

The rest of the world. Yes that means everyone but you North American's (and some lucky Europeans) who currently have all the options in the world for PVR / DVR's might not get the best spin off from this release. But people like me in poor old Australia who currently has no option what so ever for a PVR. :( Even all the opensource options are made in the Northern Hemisphere, so poor people like me would have to somewhere find (steal) their programming info.. :(

For this reason thank god MS has come to the party, finally a big player that will push a "Good Thing(TM)" world-wide. Once they have set the stage all us Open Source freaks can pilfer their work into our free alternatives. :)

Of course only if Microsoft is planning on introducing this in Australia, hello?? Ohh, come on.. I really need to get out of this 3rd world country. :(

Re:Why this is a Good Thing(TM).

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, I live in Aus and I couldn't give a stuff about this. All you need is a MSI TV@nywhere (records staight to MPEG-1/2 Video) and a machine with room for taping onto. Works great.

If you need anymore info contact me at jason@oranadisability dot com :)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Same old same old

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I disagree! +5 Insightful!!@#%&^@#$(*@#$~ Your p0s+ r0x0r$!!!!

GC

[Fadekun]

What's the deal with recording shows? Don't people just...remember anymore?

Re:Yikes! Huge file sizes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely, MS can squeeze stutter-free performance out of moderately powerful CPUs and HDs, can't they?

No.

Tivo's revised service agreement.

[ChaosDiscord]

This is Tivo's new service agreement in PDF, and here is Google's copy of Tivo's service agreement converted to HTML.

Unfortunately I'm unable to dig up the agreement I originally signed on for to comparision, but the following are changes from the previous agreement:

2. The TiVo Service. The basic TiVo service consists of program guide information and the following features: ... Season Pass... WishList... Smart Recording... TiVo Suggestions... Parental Controls.

This is fairly subtle, but the previous agreement basically just said that service consisted of program guide information. Nothing else. The other features were implicitly part of the unit you purchased. Sure, the features weren't terribly useful without guide information, but if you could find another way to provide guide data those feature would work. Now they're claiming that if you fail to pay you have no rights at all these features which are entirely managed within the unit.

3. Changes to Your TiVo Service. TiVo may, at its discretion and from time to time change, add or remove features and functionality of the TiVo Service or the TiVo DVR (when the TiVo DVR access TiVo's servers) without notice. If you are dissatisfied with any such changes to the TiVo Service, you may immediately cancel your subscription as provided in section 13 ("Termination of Service").

Given the helpful definitions of features in the previous section, TiVo is clearly reserving the right to remove Season Passes, WishList, Smart Recording, TiVo Suggestions, Parental Controls and other functionality. Sure, it seems unlikely that they'll take such features away, but why are they asking for the right to? Those are specifically the features they advertised the Tivo as having, and the reason I bought mine.

But I can terminate the service if I don't like it? Given the new changes, my Tivo effectively becomes a giant paperweight. And (checking Section 13), my lifetime subscription that I paid for before this change will not be refunded in any way, so I'm especially S.O.L..

10. Using the TiVo Service. ... you agree not to tamper with or otherwise modify the TiVo DVR.

The rest of the section is pretty reasonable, but this little clause is unreasonable. I purchased my Tivo specifically because they were very open and had a "You void your warrantee, and we won't support you, but feel free to hack on your Tivo" policy. I wanted to support that behavior. This effectively reverses the decision. No more hard drive expansion hacks. To heck with that.

11. Advertising and Promotions. ... In order to send such content, you agree that Tivo may tune your Tivo DVR to a particular channel at a particular time.

In practice it looks like they only use this to record the silly promos I see on my main menu. That I don't mind. What I do mind is that this implies that they can preempt my normal recording to record their ads. That I object to. I doubt they ever will preempt my programming, but why not state as much in the policy?

12. Definition of Product Lifetime Subscription. ... Of course, hardware products don't last forever and their lifespan will vary.

When I purchased a lifetime subscription, I understood that the lifetime in question was for the unit, not me. I figured it just meant that if the system failed I'd need to pay to get it repaired. This working left me fearing that they may claim that once a Tivo experiences any failure that they can claim that its lifetime is over and cancel the service. Since my Tivo actually experienced a modem failure nine months into its life, this seems like a real risk to me. (On a related note, it looks like Tivo modems are fragile, thus products like this one. Get your Tivo on a phone line surge supressor!)

I brought up all of these complaints to Tivo support when I became aware of them. I got a form letter back that failed to address the issues I brought up. Feh.

Re:Tivo's revised service agreement.

[Quikah]

FYI: Modem failures are not a big deal anymore since 3.0 cam out. You can use the serial port on old TiVo's to either connect using PPP over serial or an external modem. Just enter ,#2xx for PPP over serial or ,#3xx for external modem in the dialing prefix. xx is the port speed. ,#401 tells it to use ethernet if you have tivonet or USB adapter for series 2.

Re:Tivo's revised service agreement.

[radish]

Thanks for that, it certainly does look a little worrying. One thing I can say about hardware lifespan is there are a large number of people I know of here in the UK who have had lifetime sub boxes die out of warranty. In all cases, provided they pay a fixed fee (around $150) for repair/replacement then the lifetime sub is transferred.

Why is this a new version of XP, not just an app?

[SilentTristero]

This seems like typical MS bundling. They have a nice PVR app and maybe a codec. Instead of releasing it as the "MS PVR" app or an add-on to Windows Media Player, like anyone else would, they *bundle it into the OS*. WTF? This is exactly what they got reamed for doing with IE, media player, WMA, DRM codecs, etc. etc. And they're still doing the same thing! (Yeah, that DoJ slap on the wrist really hurt...)

Don't fall for this marketing crap. Make them release it as a simple app. I don't care if it will only install if you have the XYZ tuner card or whatever, but it is NOT a new version of the OS! It is NOT "Windows MCE" whatever they tell you! It's just Windows XP with a simple (and quite nice, from what I can tell) full-screen PVR app.

Once they succeed in convincing everyone that the PVR app is "part of the OS" the market for 3rd party PVR apps will dry up, because of course who would pay money for something that comes for free? And then they can cripple it any way they want in future versions (no recording pay-per-view, no skipping commercials, no transcoding, etc.)

Don't buy this line. Anand is starting to behave like a PR flack; it's too bad. Think for yourselves, people! There are a few PVR Windows apps out there, and some of them are getting quite decent. Vote with your wallets.

-- Tristero

It had begun...

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

http://www.msnbc.com

Questionable Review

[pkinetics]

I haven't had time to read all of it, so I skipped to the sections just about video recording.

I think this is the jist in Sound And Vision magazine, I think current edition, that the video recording delay is somewhat flawed. One of the functions is to use the PVR to delay playback. However on the Media Center, the delayed playback takes 5 minutes to rewind, and the delayed record holds only up to 30 minutes. So if you delay 30 minutes, jump in and watch, you'll miss the first five minutes!!!

I can't remember if it was in the same article or different discussions about how long it will keep recordings.

Yeah, and Flamethrower

[cslarson]

Mythtv looks really good. Also check out Flamethrower. It's still very much in development. What I'd like to see in Mythtv is dvd/vcd/avi file playback using mplayer or something. This can be added, and scripts have been written, but from what i understand, not included in the project yet.

30%...?

[posternutbaguk]

Seeing as the review stated that merely watching the tv took 30% of resources on a 2.4G P4, I was surprised (to say the least) that I got a result of 2% on my Linux 1.3GHz Athlon.

So, it looks all nice and flash but that seems to be most of what the review is about. The fact that is used all those resources and crashed seemed very minor.

Also, I see they use yet ANOTHER proprietry file format for saving video.

Maybe not a search, but how about these SIXTEEN???

[microbob]

This should scare the shit out of any XP user.

Here is a (probably incomplete) list of ways Windows XP tries to connect each user's computer to Microsoft's computers, or expects to be allowed through the user's software firewall:

1. Application Layer Gateway Service (Requires server rights.)
2. Fax Service
3. File Signature Verification
4. Generic Host Process for Win32 Services (Requires server rights.)
5. Microsoft Direct Play Voice Test
6. Microsoft Help and Support Center
7. Microsoft Help Center Hosting Server (Wants server rights.)
8. Microsoft Management Console
9. Microsoft Media Player (Tells Microsoft the music and videos you like. See the February 20, 2002 Security Focus article Why is Microsoft watching us watch DVD movies? [securityfocus.com].)
10. Microsoft Network Availability Test
11. Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service
12. Microsoft Windows Media Configuration Utility (Setup_wm.exe, sometimes runs when you use Windows Media Player.)
13. MS DTC Console program
14. Run DLL as an app (There is no indication about which DLL or which function in the DLL.)
15. Services and Controller app
16. Time Service, sets the time on your computer from Microsoft's computer. (This can be changed to get the time from another time server.)

That and more goodies on http://www.hevanet.com/

Maybe not 'file' searches, but for sure 'internet'

[microbob]

Read below, if you use the built in search tool and search the internet (not files), it does send a lot of info back to MS.

Personally, I would not want them logging jack, but since I don't use XP....


"When you search the Internet using the Search Companion, the following information is collected regarding your use of the service: your IP address, the text of your Internet search query, grammatical information about the query, the list of tasks which the Search Companion Web service recommends, and any tasks you select from the recommendation list."


That is *a lot* of tracking they do.

http://www.theregus.com/content/4/24611.html

Anadtech is Bills Bitch

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't trust any software review they do that involves MS. Face it Bill owns their ass. They will do anything for a chance to suck his FUD. Their fawning over the stupidest MS propaganda is almost as bad as PC Rags. Every time I read an Anandtech software review, I have trouble not imagininbg stuff dripping off the reviewers chins.

Microsoft programmers are incredible!

[Pingster]

They managed to write a program guide so inefficient that even a processor running at 2.5 billion cycles per second can't scroll through the guide without stuttering.

The one thing that is worth noting that even on the HP's default Pentium 4 2.53GHz, CPU utilization can reach very high levels while scrolling through the list. Sometimes scrolling through the guide can cause the TV encoding process to stutter which is definitely unfortunate as stuttering isn't nearly this common with set-top PVRs.

That's just amazing. It's just a list of program titles, for goodness' sake. I don't think most programmers would waste that many CPU cycles even if they were trying really hard.

Gotta hand it to them.

Movix

[Emrikol]

I can't beleive I don't see one single comment about movix so far! That's terrible! I for one have been looking at it, and think that the project looks like it has a great future. I only wish that there was more that I could do. I know my programming skills are too rusty (I'm used to programming for my old 486).

Thanks for everything!

Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you call the personal computer, then?

Do you think some marketeer sat down and thought, "I bet we could sell a lot more TV's and typewriters if we *combined* them!"

Re:Why is this a new version of XP, not just an ap

[UnixRevolution]

There are only 2 problems with this argument. 1. Not all M$ products will ship with the MCE stuff built in. 2. To even GET MCE, you need to buy microsoft's endorsed hardware, since they won't just sell you the raw OS.

Re:MS wins again

[BarrettAnderson]

and like linux boys never take unnecessary jabs at Microsoft? please!!! you freeking moron - you guys do it ALL THE TIME... and there's not enough people at slashdot to tell you that you do it WAY too much, and in all the wrong ways.

for example:

"Microsoft doesn't use the same TCP/IP stuff as everyone else??? OH MY GOSH!!! it's FASTER??? THEY MUST BE CHEATING"

almost as bad as saying Bush is lowering taxes???? WHY! that's ridiculous! they NEED more money in the government

which, btw, is the stupidest thing i've ever heard. (but still comparable to what you guys say about MS). so keep your fork tongue behind your teeth. I did not pass through fire and death to bandy trick words with a witless worm

Terms of service

[Anonymous Coward]

"..you have to scroll through the 44 pages of the Terms of Service"

Perhaps they should just publish a novel instead of beating around the bush.

Ohh right I'm really gonna trust microsoft

[sniperindisguise]

How am I supposed to trust microsoft with all my media? Can I even use all my junk on another computer?

Re:MS wins again

[BarrettAnderson]

HOW THE FREEKING HECK WAS THAT FLAMEBAIT??? you freeking faggot moderators. just because you disagree with my opinions doesn't mean my comments are evil. that was NOT flame bait. How do i know that it wasn't flame bait? because i wasn't trying to attract a flame. I was STATING MY FREEKING OPINION. I'm sick of you guys modding me down because i don't like these morons who say microsoft is bad because it's better than linux.

Re:MS wins again

[BarrettAnderson]

wait, let me guess how that was flamebait... can't think of a way to reply to my comment? i guess i win

Question about the program guide

[roc_machine]

Ok, I'll apologize ahead of time if this has already been asked (and I'm sure it has):

What interests me most in the Tivo and the Media Center PC is the program guide interface... it is unbelievably polished and quite detailed (ex. snippets about each show). What I would like to know is: Is there a Windows and/or OSX (I'll be buying an ibook shortly) equivalent program guide out there that can give me the same "look and feel" that the Tivo and Media Center provide? I don't care about recording features, nor do I care if the software would cost me money. I just want a program guide that looks as slick as that.

I would really appreciate any responses to this.

Thanks in advance.

Re:Maybe not 'file' searches, but for sure 'intern

[Anonymous Coward]

"When you search the Internet using the Search Companion, the following information is collected regarding your use of the service: your IP address, the text of your Internet search query, grammatical information about the query, the list of tasks which the Search Companion Web service recommends, and any tasks you select from the recommendation list."

That is *a lot* of tracking they do.

I'm curious, when you search Google, how do they do a search without knowing your IP address, the text of your Internet search querry, and grammatical information about the querry?

It's pretty impressive that Google can perform a search for you without knowing how you are or what you're looking for.

Re:MS wins again

[Eric Damron]

It was flamebait because you engaged in mindless name calling. For example if I called you a dickless scum sucking maggot this post would probably be modded down as flamebait. But I won't do that.

I always try to avoid stating the obvious.

Re:MS wins again

[BarrettAnderson]

what name calling? i called him a moron, but it's true - he is. You can't apply certain rules to yourself and other rules for other people. Linux users don't get the benefit of fabricating bullcrap about microsoft whenever they want if microsoft users get modded down for the same thing.

Re:Why is this a new version of XP, not just an ap

[Billly Gates]

You mean drm approved OS?

Did you know to get a soundcard WIndowXP certified, it needs to include drm support?

Don't believe me? Why does XP use %25 of the cpu usage for doing any sound from Media player yet it does not do so when playing a game? Its because the ms media player's drm uses an encryption layer to please the RIAA so you can not tap and record any tune that you are listening to. Its mainly there for the advertisments on the defualt pop up screen. I guess hollywood is diluted enough to think that someone might record the demo and upload it to kazaa and throw the whole into communism as a result. I read it here on slashdot.

I believe ms wants to knock apple out of the multimedia market by making sure only WIndows pc's can be drm proctected while apple leaves copyrighted works as unprotected! If you go to apple's quicktime website you will see a whole bunch of movie previews. Microsoft is using the drm pitch to make all the big hollywood studio's sign into exclusive wmv and wma contracts for there demo's as well as space for the default opening page for the media player so quicktime and anything non Windows is no longer relavant in the digital age. Scary as hell.

Re:Maybe not 'file' searches, but for sure 'intern

[microbob]

Who do you trust:

1) Google

2) Microsoft

Re:Need faster processors? Whatever...

[sunspot42]

>MCE does everything through software which,
>in technical terms "sucks ass".

RTFA. Microsoft specifically requires MCE PCs to come with a dedicated MPEG encoder hardware. It is not "doing everything through software". In fact, according to the article ATI and nVidia are having fits precisely because of the outrageous hardware requirements Microsoft has slapped on these systems.

Sounds to me like yet another case of crappy, bloated code from Microsoft. What a surprise. Would never have seen that one coming.

Coming soon...

[m00nun1t]

...is Lindows LP Ledia Lenter Ledition.

Watch closely, Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch MS's moves in this area closely, Linux fans and developers, as it shows what happens when you have a relentless focus on usability and conquering a mainstream market. This is a perfect example of something that MS will get mostly (but not entirely) right the first time, but will quickly improve and turn into a serious product. And it's all built on a combination of installed base and end-user friendliness that Linux will never match.

Typical MS vs. Open Source thread

[usurper]

Here's my issue with OpenSource: Bad communication.

Microsoft has put out a product that's decent. Yeah, the hardware control issue is clearly a purely political and non-consumer based decision, but I'm guessing after the initial phase, MS will introduce a package with the OS and remote. Or something similiar. Either way, it's released. I can go buy it, hook it up, and it all works.

On the OSS side, looking through this thread I have 15 links for 15 products that are all 50% of the way there. Some have no recording. Some don't have remote support. Some have issues with schedules. Blah blah blah. It seems that there is a lot of bright people with great ideas....that have NO IDEA that other projects are out there. What's the deal? Isn't the whole mantra of OSS to have a community collaborate and build a better product for that community? Why is there always a massive disconnect between efforts?

Either way, it's frustrating, and not worth the time or effort to sort through.

/Me SIghs

[Ditido]

Well for the moment i thought Microsoft finally has something that excites me untill the article states that you can buy MCS unless purchasing the PC itself. I guess i wait for a gnuMCS and wait for M$'s enraged reaction.

Oh Great!

[AlbertSiegel]

Now I need to reboot my VCR when it crashes after I set the VCR+? Will it be Y3k ready? Crap!

Re:Maybe not 'file' searches, but for sure 'intern

[Anonymous Coward]

1)

WinDVD and MCE

[Shaheen]

The article points out that WinDVD 3.0 is able to play the ASF files encoded by Media Center Edition. The reason this is true is that WinDVD looks for the codecs installed on your system when it runs into a format it does not have native support for. This is evident when playing DivX files in WinDVD. I find it hard to believe that Anandtech wouldn't realize this simple fact in its reporting.

What about the Mac?

[MrMadnutz]

Anyone take a look at eyeTv? http://www.elgato.com
Plug int your USB port and GO, GO GO!!!!

VDR users should be worried ....

[mattia]

It looks like the folks who make the Linux based Video Disk Recorder have a new standard to live up to.

... yeah VDR users should really be worried about something that requires a p4 > 2.5Ghz and is not able to do this (I do have VDR installed on a machine with a PIII 800 and a k6III@300 Mhz, the only thing the K6 can't handle is divx replay):

- multiple channels recording (with multiple languages/dolby digital)
- MP3/DVD/VCD/Divx replay (no drm, no region codes no nothing)
- Network streaming (Oh yes, even to a windows client) of a live channel
- Timeshifting
- LCD support
- network remote control
- timers/searches/recording handled through web interface
- support for external RGB sources (requires a MPEG2 encoder card)

..and ....

- No internet connection required whatsoever
- no keyboard required
- no license required
- no windows ;-)
- mpeg2 or divx recordings
- a minimal installation requires less than 20 MB (for the whole linux system plus VDR itself)

.. the only drawback is that vdr ir sat-centric and it is designed from the ground for broadcasts that follow the DVB standard (i.e. pretty useless in the U.S.) ... lucky me I live in Italy .....

Re:Same old same old

[nagora]

Oh I disagree! +5 Insightful!!@#%&^@#$(*@#$~ Your p0s+ r0x0r$!!!!

You sad, sad little man.

TWW

Aren't you breaking the law?

[Jens]

Well, so you are denying Microsoft the right to modify their OS on your computer as they wish (they claim they have the right in the EULA). So your Microsoft licence is void, ie. you are using an illegal copy.

Which is probably exactly what you'll hear when you complain to Microsoft. Which is also why law firms and insurances are dropping Windows XP like a hot potato - their customer data is on the computer and NOBODY has a right to view it, not even Microsoft.

Go figure.

Linux PVRs need a new standard????

[Thnurg]

Firstly, did Anandtech REALLY have to use 27 pages (some of which were only a couple of lines) for their review.
Secondly, this Media Centre is far too restrictive. It requires a PVR tuner card that can do hardware MPEG-2. You can't buy it as software, but only as a Media Centre PC. Why on Earth should we have to buy a Media Centre Operating System? All it is is XP with a MCE application, why not sell the app to those who already have XP?
OK, so the Linux PVRs are still a little geeky. (Which may be a good thing, as projects like mythTV are simple to use once installed and configured, we could make cash installing it for others at a fraction of the Media Centre cost).
But Linux PVRs don't have anywhere near the restrictions of Media Centre. They don't use proprietary codecs, and any niggles you may have with them can be ironed out by yourself.
I don't think I'll be bothering with a Media Centre PC. They seem too inflexible for my tastes.

Re:Maybe not 'file' searches, but for sure 'intern

[Ilgaz]

Neither, in fact nobody.

Google's use of Linux doesn't make me trust more to them. They are just a commercial company. Not heroic "angels". Wake up already!

Limewire is opensource now with GPL but their commercial installer installs the evil TopMoxie with the client which I believe was coded by Limewire founders themselves.

They having "GPL" label doesn't make them fully trustable. It works for Google too.

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here...

Re:Need faster processors? Whatever...

[Mike Bridge]

/shrug i have 70-80 season passes, and it takes about 2 minutes to recompute 2 weeks worth of recordings after i change the priority of one, not sure why your's is taking that long unless each show has 14 episodes per day on....

Re:Yikes! Huge file sizes!

[downrodeo]

I agree. This file size is completely unacceptable. I find a few more faults that seem to spell failure unless they are looked at closely 1. File Size as noted above. I have used TiVo and have dabbed witht the other one, (Replay TV is the name i believe) and they use much less space with equal visual quality. and it is quite easy to upgrade HD when necessary. 2. Video Format. Unless you can burn the show onto a VCD and play it on your buddies 60 inch, MCE doesnt do a damn thing for me. 3. Complete failure of communication with ATI and nVidia. These two companies control almost all of the video card market. and as fasr as the all in wonder series goes, it is a damn good card for what al you get. Software based encoding is a much better solution and would only make MCE a stronger alternative 4. I already have a nice enough computer. If i want to make a TV Box, i will buy a shuttle and assemble it myself, use quality parts and then install hte OS myself. but that sems to be a problem since there is not going to be a consumer version of MCE. I mean, i love alienware and think their navigator pro media center is very nice, but i do not have that type of money flow and do not want to plunk down money for something i can easily do myself. If this is the same as windows XP with the adition of the media center, how hard woujld it be to sell it as an ujpgrade and let people work it out for themselves?

WHY it took 27 pages

[kcb93x]

The ads, and the small width of the columns is why it used 27 pages. Most sites do this, but what I do to read the whole story on sites that decide to display this way is to find the 'Print article' link. Works every time. Usually only one ad banner (at the top) and sometimes one at the bottom.

Last Post!

[alpg]

If you're crossing the nation in a covered wagon, it's better to have four
strong oxen than 100 chickens. Chickens are OK but we can't make them work
together yet.
-- Ross Bott, Pyramid U.S., on multiprocessors at AUUGM '89.

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...