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TiVo, MS, and the War for the Living Room

Posted by simoniker on from the ready-fight dept.

r-blo writes "Hot off his in-depth comparison of TiVo vs. Microsoft Media Center, Engadget has Thomas Hawk following up with ten things each that TiVo and Microsoft need to do to win the War for the Living Room. It won't be easy (like TiVo offering their OS as software for the PC. Not going to happen.) but I've got a feeling they might be better off listening up. Especially TiVo, since we're all rooting for them anyway."

2 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. So basicly he want a mythtv box. by Robert+The+Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Almost everything he talked about is in someform of completion on the http://www.mythtv.org/.

  2. Windows MCE by Universal+Indicator · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have been using Windows Media Center for several months now and have been very pleased with it. Its great having your recorded shows available on your home network to watch on any computer in the house whenever you want, not to mention being a huge digital jukebox -- just throw in as many hard drives as you can and you've got true media "center" capabilities, you can't say that for a TiVo.

    The biggest advantage the Media Center has is that you can play any AVI files you want as long as you have the codec installed. And the remote control works with every proprietary IR device (ie cable boxes) that I throw at it.

    I tried MythTV, and while its a great project, XP MCE has it beat at this point in time by far, but I think that may be mostly due to most hardware drives being written for Windows only.

    Although I'm looking forward very much to MCE 2005, in all fairness I haven't tried a TiVO, and the TivO's dual-tuner functionality is something that the MCE misses. However, when you're using a digital cable box, having a second tuner doesn't matter anyway.