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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!"
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!
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.
http://use.perl.org
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
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?
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
Carpe Diem
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.
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?
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!
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.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
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?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
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.
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...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
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.
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.
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....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
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.
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:
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.
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..
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.
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?
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.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
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
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/
.
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.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
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)
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
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.
hany