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Roadkill on the Convergence Highway
Duke Weber writes "Microsoft sometimes gets it right after three tries. Not so with Windows Media Center 2005. You do get a dancing Scooby Doo. You don't get much Media." From the article: "As a DVR, one tuner was just OK, with a second tuner working, it was still OK, provided you weren't too picky about mouths moving at the same time words came out. Out with the snazzy Realtek integrated sound on the ASUS-A8V motherboard. In with an Audigy 2ZS to lessen the load on the AMD 64 3000+ processor. More gadgets. That cured the synch. The picture still was no where close to a vintage Tivo. But it does keep track of the programs, important with a terabyte of disc."
The biggest issue with media centers is a very practical one: tuning. How do you tune channels from cable or satellite providers when a set top box provided by cable or satellite provider is essentially required? The "IR blaster" solution is inelegant at best, and gets even more inelegant if you want more than one tuner. That was Microsoft's biggest miscalculation in the media center strategy.
Conversely, the cable and satellite providers themselves will be able to provide one device that can record all of your digital content, AND acts as your set top box, AND has multiple tuners AND handles SD, HD, digital, and analog, AND doesn't require a large initial expenditure: most providers will give you all of this for under $10/month, in a turnkey solution that "just works". Granted, it's not as flexible and capable as your own box, but most will accept this tradeoff. Most won't even know there *was* a tradeoff.
But what of all your other media? Your music, your movies, your videos? Indeed, Apple's media center strategy is a novel one: it includes all traditional media center functions except perhaps the primary one: television recording. Instead, it's taken the bold next step: bypass the tuning issue and the recording issue entirely by bypassing the cable and satellite operators entirely, and delivering the content directly to you. The cable operators will still provide a service: it will just be bandwidth, and not content.
...as long as it's easier than MythTV to set up and cheaper than Tivo over 5-10 years, I'll do it.
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the only roadkill I see on the convergence highway will be the consumers.
That is the final curse of Media Center. Even if it worked, it would still be Windows .
I've never used Windows Media Center, but almost all of the problems he's complaining about sound like hardware problems, driver issues, or he chose the wrong hardware to begin with.
I have a feeling that if he had chosen his equipment better, or done a little more research before buying everything, he wouldn't have had the problems.
Besides, he's complaining about things like a broken S Video connector in his review, that is hardly Microsoft's fault.
Primal cravings make people do strange and stupid things. They made me build a Windows Media Center PC. ... snip ...
The first secret is that you need to scam your way into getting a copy of Windows XP Media Edition 2005, which is only sold to OEMs.
I bet if this guy tried to build a real TiVo, it might suck as well.
Perhaps windows media center is sold to OEMs only because they are the ones that know how the machines have to be built to work properly?
Reviews like this are why Apple will never license MacOS X for PCs.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
For me the big issue here is that the aim of a central server that controls all of your media means that people will have to all become system adminstrators. This is hardly likely, the idea of my Wife worrying about menus to record programmes off the TV is not the sort of thing I look forwards to. Something like a TiVo is perfect as its a TV device that intends to record programmes and nothing else. My wife's iPod is perfect to listen to music on even if there is the irritant of having to connect it to the PC (and this is an irritant for her) and finally actually having paper photos to hand around is what her and her friends like doing. We could have a digital home with me as the sys admin... but my wife would hate it.
The alternative of lots of seperate devices that do their jobs pretty well and have to communicate together clearly requires too much collaboration and innovation for those companies pushing the "Digital Home" vision around a central server.
Media Centre is a great example of a company trying to force an idea it think SHOULD make it billions down the throats of people who don't want it. Give us loosely coupled devices that work together seemlessly not videos that chase us around the house or a central server that needs constant administration and updating.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Eventually I broke a nail and had to abandon the project before any more damage was sustained.
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
and this article illustrates why. Hacking together a MCE box from parts is a masochistic enterprise. MS only sells MCE to OEMs who are willing to QA their setup (acronym overload!). This writer just got a taste of what QA at Dell and HP must feel like.
You clearly need a dual processor. One processor for each tuner. Throw enough horsepower against Microsoft and even MSWord has a decent framerate.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
One mans -1 Troll is another mans +1 Funny.
One man's sig-line is another man's glaring, offensive typo.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No its just that old axiom rearing its ugly head:
"Windows users have to defend their OS, everyone else can praise theirs."
He lost my interest when I found the pic of the destroyed s-video cable.
I've been in video since the 80's and I've seen that ONCE.
You have to be a complete idiot to break an s-video cable off like that, so I can't take anything else in the article seriously. I guess he breaks keyboard and mouse connectors off too?
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
I just wish Apple would produce a media center, because you know it would be refined and more then halfway decent. Doing what it does, and doing it well. Where as Bill Gates is notorious for making a wide range of products that just work poorly. Microsoft, the product name synonymous with mediocre. Want a phone OS, Desktop OS, or Media Center right now!? Then they'll have your $$$, because MediocreSoft (aka Microsoft) is there, doing what they do not well, but darn right OK enough to get your cash and nothing more.
But it seems that companies are doing it backwards, where they they want to be in a single spot and they're sending arrows out everywhere.
This doesn't seem like convergence to me...more like...diffusion.
After long years of being a Mac-only guy, I broke down and bought an Intel box this year. And guess what? It was a Media Center 2005 PC. And you know what else? It was painless to set up and it works exactly as advertised. This guy seems to be complaining about things like broken S-Video cables ... I can hardly see how that should be Microsoft's fault.
On the other hand, he does bring up some important points. With Media Center and the hardware that came in my box, picture quality is not all that great. (I hear the Hauppauge cards offer the best quality; I might try one of those out.) You also can't time-shift FM radio. But then, like many TV tuner cards, mine didn't come with FM radio support, so it's a non-issue anyway.
Also, for a "convergence" device, recording from a video source is exactly as painful as he describes. I could find NO software on my system that would let me record from VHS tape, except for one program that required me to insert DVD media. Unlike his case, it worked for me. But the point remains that this is totally stupid. What if I don't want to burn it to a DVD? What if I'd like to, um, you know ... check to see that I was getting a signal from my VCR first? Sorry, no way to do that. Your best option is to set it for a five-minute trial run and check to see if it worked after the program burns the results to a DVD.
Another semi-retarded thing about Windows Media Center is that it records TV in a proprietary Microsoft format, DVR-MS. I am told that this is MPEG internally, but you need to export it with a different piece of software (NeroVision Express works) if you want to get a usable file that you could convert to XviD, for example.
What's more, every video format you play in Windows Media Center is handled with a DirectShow filter. That's good, in the sense that when you install new codecs in XP they are automatically picked up by Media Center, so you can play your DivX, XviD, etc. There is one caveat, however, and that is that you can't stream these formats to another system via a Media Center Connector or whatever you call it, like your Xbox 360. I think only Windows Media and MPEG formats are supported.
And another glitch with the DirectShow involves timing, which inevitably means you get these stutters in your video every few minutes when you're watching them on a TV. The guy who invented ReClock explains it all in great length. The downside is that ReClock doesn't seem to work so well with Media Center yet.
So, yeah, this "review" is dumb, and you shouldn't expect to be able to bash together a Media Center PC in a weekend and expect it to work. In fact, you may just want to spend $1,400 and buy one, like I did. But even if it works, Media Center is pretty far of from being a "TiVo killer" just yet. If all you want is a DVR, you should buy one of those. I bought the Media Center PC primarily because I wanted an x86 PC, and in that dual capacity it works fine for me.
Breakfast served all day!
This guy's problem is not Windows Media Center, it is because he built the machine himself. If he did any research, he would have learned that hardware compatibility is key to having a smooth running MCE. Using built in sound chip? PUHLEEZE! Unless you have Intel chipset, you are going to have some major problems (VIA boards SUCK!!!) You could have gotten a $20 Chaintech AV-710 and he would never have had to deal with his sound problems. And poor picture? I am guessing he purchased some cheap 1st generation tuners. If you would have gotten ATI 550 based tuners, the picture quality would surpass that of any Tivo. And did you even try HDTV??? IT ROCKS!!! It is VERY important that you test out hardware compatibility before building an MCE yourself (unless you want to do a LOT of experimentation). Which is WHY MS DOES NOT SELL MCE by itself!!! If you have the right hardware setup, MCE is a pleasure. I have over 500GB recorded TV and another 100GB of music and picture. I also have about 50 DVD's ripped on the hard drive that I can watch without ever getting up from the couch. There is no other device (including APPLE) that will allow you to do that as easily as MCE.
CableCard will fix this problem when it becomes mandatory and ubiquitous.
This is the one good thing about the FCC overstepping its bounds and mandating hardware support (unlike the broadcast flag).
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I'll try to put asside the apparent anti-M$ bias in the article and read it for what it is; a complaint based on poor hardware choices and a lack of understanding for what a media center should be.
Its pretty universal amongst geeks that computers belong in the living room controlling everything from lights to music to tv to door alarms...or maybe that's just me. No one, and I do mean no one, has managed to put it all together in one EASY TO USE AND REASONABLY PRICED package. You've gotta go in knowing that's the case, and you've gotta go in with a clear sense of what you want to accomplish in your price point.
I've been running MCE 2005 for about 6 months now and its doing everything I want it to do with only one major issue, HD, and that's not Microsoft's fault...its a mix of congress and cable companies. With a moderately priced 3ghz box and 1gb of ram, and a paultry 120gb of storage, I can record/watch tv, burn shows to DVD, play my music, do a funky slide-show of my pictures...and then do all of those things upstairs in a room with only a tv and an MCE extender. Add to that a wireless keyboard/mouse, and I'm editing pictures and video on my 50" HDTV. All of that is accessible by the average joe non-geek, and I think that is the whole point.
Throw in some geeky tweaks and hacks, and we're talking about streaming HD content to the box with firewire (stupid content flags), ripping and streaming DVDs and playing Age of Empires III the way it was intended...50" of pure glory.
Back to the gripes of the article, I'm having a hard time feeling sympathy. Leave the AMD thing out of it, I'm sure they make a fine product.
-However, think AUDIO IN A MEDIA PC. What did you come up with, 16 bit Sound Blaster? One would assume that you'd want something phat like an Audigy or better.
-Then there is this idea that "As a DVR, one tuner was just OK[...]", sorry, but TiVo and all similar devices have 2 tuners as well, that's why you can record one show and watch another, that gripe doesn't hold water.
-I'm missing the problems recording VHS, never had any problems.
-ATI and HDTVs as monitors is the bane of all media pc's from what I understand. Yeah, ok, I'll buy into that being a valid gripe, but I tossed my X300 in the garbage where it belonged and went nVidia and all is well. S-Video for HD...err...the guy needs to smoke another one.
-The truly valid gripe is with music. The thing is that this is supposed to be accessible to non-geekers, so the default settings try to pull in all your music and catalog it for you. I've tried all sorts of auto-catalog software, and none have worked 100% on my collection. It's pretty darn easy to go into the settings for Media Player and UNCHECK A SINGLE BOX that says "Let Media Player Catalog My Music". After that, it will just use the standard tags, not try to rename andything, and refer to folder.jpg as the album cover. Easy easy easy.
I'm not saying its perfect, but when I think it needs to be said that this is the first OS/HW combo that has gone semi-mainstream in this realm, and pleanty have tried. Combine that with the fact the MS originally was INSISTING on OEM only so they could be sure the hardware could handle the load...but people complained...and now there are gripes that the hardware can't handle the load in non-OEM machines...err...
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
My small company is an OEM System Builder, even though we don't want to build and sell computers (we'd rather fix them).
Microsoft invited us to an event, gave us a for-resale copy of MCE 2005, and sold us $1200 worth of hardware that they selected to work with MCE for $399: mobo, Athlon 64 3000+, RAM, video card, tuner card, everything but a case and power supply.
So, I brought it all home, built a Media Center, and invited it into our lives.
It did what we asked of it, although it did so rather poorly.
The sound and video were synched OK, and the TV listing and recording features were easy to use. The remote control and IR blaster worked our Comcast digital box with about 95% reliability (and that 5% is a HUGE pain in the ass, let me tell you). All in all, it did most of what a TiVo (or Comcast's own DVR) could manage, in a much larger and louder package.
(Note: You can install more than one tuner card, but you must use the same tuning method on all cards... to do this on our setup, we would have needed to use two rented digital cable boxes).
Here's the best part: the build was only stable for about a month, after which it would BSOD and reboot itself about once a day. Rebuilding the OS would solve the problem for another month, so it was NOT hardware-related.
God forbid I had actually sold one of these things!
Happy ending: the parts made a smoking fast desktop, which is stable (as stable as any Windows box, at least).
Three letters QAM: I presently get my Cable TV without a Cablebox. It wasn't really an intentional decision on my part (I hate to admit this, so maybe I will delete that bit when I finish). I was rebuilding the familyroom and the new Samsung HL-R6168W was delivered too early:). I am paying my Cable company for "Basic" and "Family" and was able to receive them in Analog. So I had to test the new TV within 30 days (30 day return no questions) so I just plugged it into the Coaxial and set it to "find" all the channels. So so it did, for ALL my analog channels and then surprise it kept going and going... In all seriousness it found the "digital" (480P)equivalent of the Basic + Family set I am paying for, well at least when those channels have a digital signal. Then it found all the Broadcast channels in "HD"! Surprise!!!! I asked around a few questions of senior people on forums, from the Cable company I use (helpful and honest people) and they "admitted" that TVs with "QAM" tuners can decode all the digital and HD signals NOT encrypted. So that means that I still don't get HBO either analog, or HD, or ESPN HD, or SHowtime HD. NONE of the chanels I don't pay for can I receive. Fair enough isn't it? Please note if you have a QAM enabled tuner you MUST check that the Cable signal is compatible, mostly the answer is yes...but do check first. SO to summarize I get: o All the original channels I pay for: in analog o The equivalent: in digital 480P 0 The equivalent broadcast type channels: in HD 720P/1080i o I even pick up at least one PBS HD channel It all depends what you want. If you want a decent service thru HD w/o Premium channel content, you don't need a Cablebox of any kind. And a PC with a QAM based HD Tuner, like the Fusion, would also be able to record ALL the above and replay in the same quality received. If you want Premium Channels and especially if you want them in HD, then you have not only to pay for the extra service, but also the digital HD decoding Cablebox and remote.
AMD64, Audigy, hardcore mobo? I've had a dual tuner (PVR-250) PVR, with a miniATX Athlon 2000+, nVidia 5200 and a Fortissimo III (for the optical output) running without a hitch with SageTV for years. It not only records two shows at once but will replay a third without breaking a sweat!
What? I can only watch 4 lousy ABC shows? What? Only 320 by 200 resolution???
You fail to think of the future, when there could be a lot more TV shows there. Possibly even in better resolution though the current one is more than good enough to convey the subtle nuances TV has to offer (I can tell you've not tried watching any of them). It's definatley a far cry better than VCR or over the air quality.
The basic principle is sound. Why bother with all the UI and technical architecture issues you have with recording when the whole point of a PVR is to get a file into a random access digital file anyway? Aren't you simply better off starting with a whole digital file and working from there? Why does there need to ever be a time component involved other than when content is initially put up for aquisition?
TV viewers are like someone waiting at an airport luggage carosel, waiting until just the right interval of time arrives to get what they want. Why should TV viewing be that unpleasant now when there is no need. Why doesn't your video luggage just arrive and wait right in front of you for you to get it, now that it can.
I can also watch HD football on the Mac BTW - either with an HD tuner or downloading a torrent of same. In the future I should just be able to come home any time and start a football stream from scratch if I like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Having run XP MCE 2005 since it came out, I have to believe that this "review" is useless and the "reviewer" is clueless. There's several things in the article which, just one of them, could be a mistake, but all of them together make it seem like the reviewer is not qualified to review XP MCE.
First of all, the author thinks that the IR Blaster is a receiver. Secondly, the reviewer resorted to using S-Video over HDMI...then managed to break an S-Video cable. Not that PowerStrip is easy to use, but it seems that the author was incapable of using it.
As to adding music, I'm not sure what's wrong with the author's network, but I have about 100GB of music and MCE adds it relatively quickly - certainly in minutes, not days as the reviewer indicated.
I'm not sure what the reviewer's problem is with the radio - did he not realize you could manually select a station with the seek function?
As to the general problems relating to him implying it was sluggish on his PC (Audio Sync Problems, slow importing time, etc) something is clearly wrong with how he configured his PC - I have MCE 2005 running on a machine less than 1/2 the speed (P4 1.6GHz) and it runs great with two tuners. Is XP MCE perfect? No. But I've used TiVo, ReplayTV, MythTV and XP MCE and so far MCE is my favorite.
Anyway, I conclude that the reviewer is unqualified to offer a review on a product like this - especially because he blamed MCE for his faults/problems he took on by building his own box, rather than buying a prebuilt one. It's certainly not hard, as I did it, but clearly he had problems.
Many cable operators, such as Charter, encrypt all digital channels. Including non-premium channels.
So while this may work for you, it doesn't work for most people (and probably won't work for you in the future).
If I thought this, or even CableCard, was a solution, I would have mentioned it.
People always assume you need to spend a great deal of money for Tivo box. I recently bought a Tivo 40 hour for $50AR. I bought a 300gig HD for $100. I spent $299 for the lifetime subscription. So, for $449 I now have a 300 hour Tivo box.
You might say,"But you modified it, lost your warranty, etc". That is true, I threw away my 90-day warranty on a device that you can easily get spare parts for almost like a computer (check out www.weaknees.com). I also gained 300 hours worth of Tivo time that took me an hour to install using free software.
Now, on the value of Tivo versus Myth.TV and the variety of other vendors. It will cost you well more than $800 for the hardware to properly run a computer that is setup similar to a Tivo box. If you make it a Media Center computer, you're talking easily $1500-2000 for something that isn't much cheaper than Tivo. Cost wise, I spent $449 dollars over a 5-10 year period on something that will work. No messy fixes, no glitches because a built-in soundcard doesn't have a linux driver, it just works.
Tivo is to media devices what Apple is to computers, they build things that work intuitively. Take the dive, spend the money up front, and enjoy Tivo. The work-arounds for a "free" DVR aren't there, and probably never will be.
...and another thing...
Perhaps the "builder" did not realize that Google Provides All. There is a site called The Green Button (I think its UK based), that is currently the best MCE forum around. There were a couple of instances where I wanted to do something the MCE didn't natively do and TGB provided me with solutions.
I'd say anyone who wants a more balanced oppinion of what MCE IS and what MCE IS NOT, should spend 20 minutes flipping through that forum and seeing what people are praising, griping about, and generally doing with MCE. Either that, or believe the (oh my god, I'm going to use this horrible term, I swore I never would, omg...) FUD.
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate