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HP Exits Media Center Business
MCE writes "The first big adapter of Microsoft's Media Center Edition is quietly dropping MCE. HP is ceasing production of its Digital Entertainment Center, the only real success story for Media Center PCs in a living-room form factor. As the first company to embrace Microsoft's MCE, at a time when the platform was still half-baked, HP was simply spent by the time Vista rolled around. Now the company will put its resources into MediaSmart, a new line of TVs with a digital media adapter (not an MCE) built in. HP insists that its departure is not a statement about the viability of the Media Center platform."
I installed MythTV under OongaBoonga lunix and then called to get new balls for my mice and THEY HUNG UP ON ME AND CALLED ME A FAG0T! They managed to say it with one G, and a 0 too.
Which was nice.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Adopter.
Spell check sure is wonderful!
HP is ceasing production of its Digital Entertainment Center, the only real success story for Media Center PCs in a living-room form factor.
You're completely missing the point that MCE was a dry-run to get the xbox done right. The path of the XBOX + xbox marketplace is the real fruit of Microsoft's MCE endeavor.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
...too much computer. If it was a pared-down machine with WinXP embedded, simplified interface (as in, maybe only Media Center?), etc. and brought it in under $500, it could have had a shot. However, computing on the couch (with a TV, no less) just feels odd to me, and probably to a lot of people out there. In addition, people who want a full-blown computer in their living room AND desktop are fairly limited in number - or at least that's what gut instinct is telling me.
HP was in the media center business?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I own an HP Media Center and it works great. That aside, this is just business. HP wants to address a market of people who want DVR/AVI/MPEG and of course TV abilities. To do this HP must design a platform that aligns with their business model. It used to be MCE and now its a digital media adapter. They perform the same roles. HP is and integrator of tech and one obvious benefit of their new choice will be lower support costs as I suspect it will be more difficult to crash a simpler embedded system than a full blown install of XP. I think this is a means of reducing costs and therefore increasing profits - something every good company tries to do.
Shh.
(phone rings... whispers... "$150 per copy of Vista?!")
Ahem... on second thought, I respectfully withdraw that last statement.
...you can't run XP and media player with anything but cutting edge horsepower. If you'd buy a $1500 computer and a $400 set top box, you'd probably jump at the idea of an $1900 combination box, right? Sort of a iPhone approach ($300 ipod + $300 phone = $600 iphone). Problem is that it really wasn't up to snuff - at least not TiVo-like plug and play.
Now they're facing a bigger battle - Vista. MCE is included, but the Vista version is more expensive, and you need two cores, minimum because the OS takes so much power to keep from imploding that you can't run media player and the OS in one core. Add HD to that, which took a tweaked box and a 3+ GHz processor in XP (plus incense, a rabbits foot, 2-3 shamrocks, and occasional human sacrifice), and you practically have to have a high dollar box. Oh, and no cable card support.
I'd throw in the towel, too. I've heard good things about MCE in the enthusiast forums, but those folks are willing to put up with a lot.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
How is this interesting? What are the implications?
(I'm sure it is, it just seems.. moot to me).
After having my DEC for five months I've figured out a few things: MCE sucks ass, MCE breaks REAL easy: even allowing automatic updates to run is enough to break it, the media guide is the worst I've ever used, and extended warranties rock. I've had to send back my DEC for both software and hardware issues, and I'm going to purchase an extended warranty for as long as I try to keep it. HP is gonna pay out the ass for Microsoft's mistakes.
On a good day it's an excellent device; all the features you would want, a very nice look and feel, and more than enough oomph out of the box to record two signals and play a DVD at the same time. It's just the "not finished-ness" of MCE. NO plans to sample Vista either.
Hp, my machine is broke, I'll be calling when I get an hour or two to go through the song and dance with your tech support again.
HeyBiff
Even the Sun goes down.
that on their new systems changing the channel voids the warranty.
Shawn's Tech Articles
Since when does Xbox come with TV tuners or DVR software?
That is what MCE was for.
I have a self-built MCE PC. It's very nice; it has a wonderful, reasonably speedy interface, records HDTV via antenna or cable (thanks to some specialized hardware), and allows me to do some nice HD upconverting for SDTV Xvid stuff and DVDs.
I can not imagine any of my family, friends, or acquaintances buying one. They're expensive when done right, and they're really only useful for a very small portion of the population. In essence, MCE PCs have two big draws: a nice interface for music/movie/picture viewing and DVR functions. For a smaller group, upconversion and scaling is a selling point, but I doubt they register in the grand scheme of MCE owners.
If people want DVR, they get it from their cable company (just ask TiVO). If they want HD DVR, they get it from their cable company. It is only a very small subset who genuinely benefit from the HD DVR features in XP MCE. It works very well with over-the-air recording, and can be hacked to enable QAM recording with certain hardware. My cable company happens to send some cable channels plus all local channels via unencrypted QAM along with my cable internet service, so I end up getting "free" HDTV service.
I have a 1080p HDTV. Most people don't have an HDTV, and thus, don't care about HD DVR features. See above about what they do when they want to record TV.
I have a nice home theater system set up; it is nice for me to be able to listen to my audio via that system. For many people that isn't particularly necessary. I also value the fact that what would be a digital cable box, a CD changer, and a DVD player are all bundled into one 3U-sized box, but for many people, the space occupied by a couple of additional boxes isn't a big deal. Even with that, I still hate the music playback interface for MCE, and usually exit out to iTunes for my audio.
In essence: the current version of XP MCE (I can't speak to Vista) is well-done, well-featured, and user-friendly enough for my wife to sit down, watch and record HDTV and listen to music. If you have an HDTV and an extra $1,500 for a nicely-done MCE computer, XP MCE is a good solution. But it's really expensive to have a dedicated PC in a living room, and it's only relevant for a small section of the population. When the MCE PCs started shipping, most of the HP models were just higher-end desktops anyway - they were merely the next model up in the line. I highly doubt that many people were actually using them as a dedicated media center. For the gadgety few who truly care about having the proper, dedicated MCE box, I'd guess they're just as likely to order from one of the many niche white-box builders (or roll their own).
IF (Huge IF) AppleTV gets some sort of official TV recording device, especially one with cable-card functionality, I could see it succeeding in this market. As it is, though, I imagine that there just aren't enough takers to justify the market for anyone other than niche builders and the occasional MCE laptop.
The nice thing about Windows XP MCE was the price. With a dual processor CPU you'll never want to use XP Home. (Well, you'd never want to use XP Home anyway, but that's a different story.) If you want all of XP Pro with the exception of Active Directory and the ability to join a domain (you can always VPN into the domain anyway), then MCE saves you a few bucks in the process.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
As was announced as CES this year, HP is launching a new product in conjunction with Microsoft called Windows Home Server. The device would logically replace their existing media center line of products, and is currently only in a beta stage with a release planned for sometime soon.
An xbox/360 and (if required) a DVR.
The xboxes (in both incarnations) are far superior to pcs for media playing and the scene is far more active for enhancement.
The PC as a out-sized home theater component was probably miscast.
It has been so successful that HP is dropping the line? Something tells me that the editorial writer differs with HP about how it should count its beans.
Most of the time when i hear or see the "Media Center" label on a corporate produced product i think of a 3 to 5 format, drm encumbered piece of trash that just happens to record TV/HDTV out of the box (into DRM or patent encumbered formats).
this is hardly worthy of the term "media center", and would best be called "PVR-enabled" instead.
media center implies you can feed it anything from wmvHD encoded with wma 7.1 ch pro audio to h.264 encoded matroska with multiple video streams, 5.1 ch aac audio streams, and multiple tracks of subs in multiple formats and it will do what needs to be done with them.
as it is, a standard nightly build install of VLC will do more than so called "Media Centers", even if the DMCA prevents them getting proper PVR capacity.
give the PC market proper cablcard availability and it will record TV/HDTV as well.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
That is very interesting.I like it very much. http://www.zuneconverter.net/
Almost everything HP puts out anymore is garbage. Its no surprise they are losing sales and killing off cutesy crap like this. The last few new HP notebooks I've had to deal with at work were awful from a hardware point of view.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
LOL. HP was in the calculator business? Maybe with all the amazing failures at HP people will someday say, "HP was in the computer business?" Could the company stay in business if it couldn't make money with tricks like expensive ink and abuse of customers that lack technical knowledge?
My experiences in the last few years with HP have been so terrible there is not enough room to document them all. When Carly Fiorina destroys a company, it stays destroyed. Like many technically oriented companies, HP has mostly incompetent people on the board of directors, who mostly have little technical knowledge.
--
U.S. government violence encourages other violence.
Hp is getting out of the DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT CENTER market. HP lauched a line of media center computers designed to look like another part of a customers home enterainment unit(or an oversized vcr). This was called the digital entertainment center(or DEC for short) lineup. The lineup was aimed at highend users, thus it was highly overpriced. I use to work for a hp subsidary that sold these as well as all other hp home products, and these sold very very poor straight from the get go.
I'll let other people tell the story. Customers are not the only people unhappy with HP. Employees are miserable, too: 14 Hewlett-Packard Company Secrets From A Former Employee.
Being involved in the digital TV industry for a few years now, I've seen that there's a big push to turn digital TVs into media powerhouses. There are chips that cost around $20 to produce (in 65nm) that will:
* Be your set top box (read: DCAS) - this is the most critical piece because it's from this that all of the media sharing frameworks like DLNA and SVP take place.
* Be your Slingbox - using DLNA- and SVP- compatible mobile devices, PCs and secondary TVs within the home plus standard Ethernet/WiFi and transcoding everything into H.264 profiles suitable for those devices
* Be your PVR - and I'm talking multiple simultaneous MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 streams with no recompression that can also be securely distributed around the home using the network
* Be your media access box - playing back all of your MP3/AAC/OGG and XviD/DivX/VC-1/WMV files, whether or not they have a DRM wrapper
Now, the trick here is that all of this can happen in the context of a single chip or platform, albeit with enormous bandwidth requirements (DDR3 dual-channel would be necessary although DDR2 can be doable with some functional tradeoffs). But the point is that they don't have to pay a Microsoft tax. Microsoft pitches CE-type OSes to the major DTV chip manufacturers (i.e. Broadcom, ST, AMD, Zoran, Mediatek, Genesis) but they usually run either Linux, some flavor of RTOS or an in-house OS. It's a lot of money to license a lot of the different standards and to put that lovely alphabet soup on the front of your new LCD TV. For example, those virtual surround technologies cost $0.50 per TV! And the end TV manufacturers like Samsung or Philips constantly bitch about these costs. When you also get to the point where issues like startup time and channel change time start impacting the end user experience, the constant battle over the control of the on-screen display, and the lack of hardware-secured conditional access solutions for cable for open PC hardware, it's a no-brainer to cut MCE out of the picture.
But really, HP has tried to take a very unique approach to DTV. They had the first DivX Connected DTV where you could take any PC and put DivX's software on it, and it would do all of the transcoding on the PC and you could view your media library on the DTV itself using your remote, both DRM-wrapped and otherwise. It's not necessarily the best solution, but it is a solution that exists today and eliminates the need for everything except an optical disc player and an A/V receiver with speakers for surround sound. This move is not only not a surprise, but the general trend that will continue until the DTV becomes the center of the digital home. At least in their eyes.
MCE won't die. There are lots of legacy TVs out there with lots of opportunities to build them in. But there are a lot of alternatives out there to MCE like GBPVR and MythTV, and you can be sure that the constant downward pressure on bill of materials costs will push the DTV guys to these types of scenarios. Couple that with the limited options for the Conditional Access and Digital Rights Management aspects on open-platform PCs (irrespective of free content), and this is exactly what you'll get.
Maybe this is a good time to buy up HP's remaining inventory on the cheap, put Ubuntu and MythTV on them, and resell them.
Yes, size does matter. So does form factor. And please correct me if I'm wrong but there are no HP media centres that you would want to fit proudly in around your TV. Small, quiet, stylish. Unobtrusive yet powerful. Something like say, a mac mini...
Seriously, if they expect people to put a full size computer will fans, power requirements and all right next to their TV and surround system (which can be pretty small) no wonder they couldn't sell any.
There are the folks like my parents who are just starting to understand the idea behind PVRs or simply want something that "just works". They're likely to go out and get a Tivo -- it's the most recognized brand name and seemingly simplest to setup for the non-technical majority. I suspect that's somewhere around two thirds of the PVR market right there. Then there are the the hardcore MythTV tweakers, who build their own PVR out of old PC parts and a capture card, use it to listen to their MP3 collections, play MAME and strip commercials from their favorite shows before transcoding and uploading them to their iPods.
That leaves this middle ground where presumably a person is not savvy enough to install Sage or Myth, but is happy administering a WinXP box that sits mostly idle in the living room so it can be within reach of the cable/sat connection. Yeah, that pretty much explains why it's a niche market.
Why can't the Apple TC succeed just as it is? When people realize they can have basic cable and simply rent or buy on ITMS all of the TV they watch for less than the price of the subscription that previously delivered it to them, and all without figuring out recordings or worrying about shows getting bumped/shifted... it's all just much nicer than when your PC is unnaturally slaved to a broadcast medium.
For live stuff I honestly think OTA HD is all most people wil need, and for that solution people can just buy an elGato HD receiver with DVR like software that automatically encodes shows recorded for use in iTunes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As an aside, did anyone notice that "hp" logo upside down is "dy"? I noticed this when I looked at my laptop logo from the opposite direction. I know, it's a completely useless factoid and way off topic, and therefore I'm posting anonymously.
This wouldn't be the first time they've murdered DEC.
I use my Macbook Pro and the eyeTV Hybrid to do my DVRing. The eyeTV2 software is really good, and has a media centre like interface. Unlike you, I watch my shows not on the Big screen, but on my iPod.
No... there really isn't a reason to sell it any more.
If you want simplicity over everything else, you Tivo. Otherwise, on the Windows side, Vista has ALL the media center stuff including the simplified on-tv interface just like the media center "version" of Windows had... It's not a seperate product that requires a seperate machine any more.
There is simply no place for the product that HP was selling, so of course they stopped making it, simple as that.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
A living-room form factor? I can see why it failed - how many people would have the room for it?
I own an HP Media Center and it works great.
Rob Pegoraro was much less than impressed by this line of machines,
under XP and Mepis does better than Vista on newer versions. Other than replacing the OS, I wonder what you did to get better results out of XP or Vista than the above cited articles.That aside, this is just business.
Sure, it's bad business to sell things that don't work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's a fine thing, to be sure, too bee shore. Now that the spelling's right, all we have to do is find the right words!
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
You mean desktoplinux.com thinks Mepis is better than Vista? Say it ain't so!!
"HP insists that its departure is not a statement about the viability of the Media Center platform." Ah, but is hardware the problem? HP can make some decent kit when they feel like it... No, rather this is a question of software. Windows MCE quite plainly is a pain in the rear to deal with. Vista has also been rumored to cut severly into the MCE experience, and suck the fun out of CableCARD. Use this comparison of Windows MCE versus the new Linux MCE distro, and see what you think. Windows MCE vs. Linux MCE
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
...both include the Mediacenter stuff that the MCE version of XP had.
I'm pretty sure HP will still be selling those, regardless of whether they'll look good under your TV. If anything, over the next few years, HP will be shifting more units of MCE-grade machines...
The interesting market for MCE was the college student in a dorm room who wanted to save space and watch TV on their PC. As a set top box, MCE was interesting only in that it brought media into a "workstation/server" right under the TV.
There have been a few interesting developments in the past few years.
1) Vista Premium and XBox 360
The MCE 2005 has a toy "Media Center Extender" which works with the original XBox to deliver video to the XBox from the XP Media Center. The XBox 360 has native support for extending the Media Center from Windows Vista, and these features work much, much better (MS didn't get it right in V1, but V2 is fine).
2) The new Windows Home Server
Home Server is built on Windows Server 2003 (i.e. it's based on XP Server, not Vista Server), and promises to be a friendly solution to the needs of people who want one box to rule all their storage, backup, media, shared folders, and want convenient ways to get remote access to home computers from the web. Obviously, it appeals to the slightly less nerdy computer user as a box to manage their TBs of files and be a central home repository. Windows XP and Vista can be used just as well for this task, but some of the new features are nice.
I personally would like it if they included MCE features so that I could install Home Server over my 400GB MCE 2005 box with dual TV tuners and use spare CPU cycles on my HT 3GHz P4 to be able to downsample and stream video content (while recording) to my laptop over the cable modem. As it is, using a share and WiFi is ok, but I can only watch media from the laptop after it has finished recording on MCE. The interesting thing from my perspective is that I'm not willing to have MCE under the TV, but I'm willing to put an XBox there with an MCE Extender and a 10/100 Ethernet.
Unfortunately for me, when upgrade time hits later this year, I get hit for memory (512MB not enough for Vista), software (Photoshop CS doesn't work on Vista), and compatability (MCE Extender for XBox doesn't work with Vista's MCE). Hopefully one of my friends of friends at Adobe will let me get an employee discount on the PS CS3. I have a friend at MS who gave me Vista Ultimate. Eventually, MS will release Halo 3, and I'll solve the XBox 369 dilemna.
Yes, HD does make XP systems wince, but my Athlon XP 2200+ and 1 GB RAM does an o.k. job with it (slow disk I/O is the bigger problem). I think the bigger thorn in MCE's foot and perhaps the thing that keeps it from realizing it's true potential (to have DVR in addition to the Media Library) is the lack of cable card support. In order to control cable STBs, one needs to put IR blasters between the STB and the comp. There is the option of getting dual ATSC tuners, which would be lovely, but one needs a big aerial to get OTA HD reception in Los Angeles and I live in an apartment. The entire TV interface within MCE is amazingly well done and it's a shame that it's very difficult to put it to use. So right now, it's merely a video player on my TV, and it's a crashy one at that. Wonderful piece of software, but almost half of it can't be appreciated because of the BS that cable/satellite/media companies put us through with cable cards.
this may be an extremely rare instance where Microsoft stepped _ahead_ of the curve instead of _following_ in the marketing sweet spot of home and business consumer comfort. Looks like Media Center shares some issues with MythTV not only because it is rough around the edges but because the whole idea of a networked multi-function entertainment center is a little ahead of what most people want to deal with.
That said, once you do make the leap there is no going back. I dread the howl that will come up from my wife if I ever have the MythTV down for more than a couple days and she has to fire up the analog TV collecting dust.
Are you from New York?
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
On my 2.66 GHz P4 laptop with 2GB of RAM, Windows Vista (Vista, because that's what all of the new HP DECs would have to be if they did keep making them) crawls, especially in the Media Center interface. In fact, the Vista MC won't even play video files, it always says files are missing, try rebooting. The same video files play fine in Windows Media Player on the same system. I brought that laptop back to XP, and it does much better. I'm not sure how demanding the XP MCE is, but XP isn't the playground for the rising generation of Media Centers... the Vista ones do require a lot of horsepower.
Personally, I'm very happy with my 1GHz MythTV box, but I don't get any HD programming.
Think of how series work - you get a show a week, with breaks.
That means that any series you watch is going to be at most $8 a month to buy outright.
That's ten series a month. People watch a lot of TV - but then, that is a lot of TV.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
HP had a GNU/Linux based MediaCenter PC but it was killed because they would lose marketing dollars from Microsoft if they shipped it. Now that HP is dropping the Microsoft MediaCenter PC for this smartTV setup, I wonder if that'll be GNU/Linux based?
But hey, I'd be happy if more HD TVs shipped without speakers let along have a MCPC embedded.
BTW, HP had a Linux and Java based handheld Jornada which met the same fate. Microsoft marketing dollars would be threatened if they shipped a Linux based handheld and the project was terminated. Microsoft innovation at work.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Mod him up! Retard..
The Washington Post article is mostly about Intel's project. The HP media center is briefly mentioned for the author to say that he was unimpressed with it in the sense that it's not much of a departure from a typical HP pc. Well obviously it doesn't have to be, any PC with a great processor, plenty of ram, a good video card, and good cd/dvd writers can be good media centers... and that's hell of alot different from "it don't work."
The second article from a biased linux zealots site, mostly complains about lack of hardware support. If Vista came preinstalled, it would have the necessary hardware support. I guess for zealots that inconvenient truth is not something that needs to be considered. The article doesn't make it sound like they had that much difficulty with either linux or windows anyway.
But, I don't see the point of discussing using linux for a media center OS. Not in the US! It's illegal to install and use libdvdcss, which takes it out of the running. And dvd playback should be an important part of a media center. So linux looses, at least in the US, sorry. I think linux > windows was only thrown in as a cheap stunt to get karma anyway. It has nothing do with the viability of HP's media center series.