Slashdot Mirror
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!"
Let's see how much unwanted DRM they lumber THIS one with...
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
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.
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!
Expect Service Pack 1 sometime in 2006...
"As long as defiance continues, they can't claim victory." -Slashdot comment
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.
Trolling is a art,
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.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
------
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Computer Power User this month. Covered the HP with the emuzed card in particular
Direct link to article without ads
I took me that long to get it installed.
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?
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.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
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
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...
We need to develop some sort of global cache list so we can add the following from the article:
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.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
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 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!
there's no place like ~
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
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.
"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.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
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.
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.
No it doesn't :)
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.
Bullshit? Read this: http://www.theregus.com/content/4/24611.html
MythTV!
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
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?
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!
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
>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.