I think over-the-air HDTV the next "killer app".
I wouldn't have considered it a few months ago, but I recently needed a new PC and paid a little more to get one of these WMCE PCs just to see what it could do. I got an ATI HDTV All-In-Wonder for a 2nd tuner, which can only do over-the-air (fine with me, because I'm too cheap to pay for good cable/satellite).
In suburban Boston with the small indoor antenna that came bundled with the $150 HDTV card, I can get 16 over-the-air HDTV broadcasts (including subchannels), though a few are not stuff I would ever watch. They are all reliable and look great. Even when showing analog content, they look far better than my analog cable channels. My viewing habits are perhaps not the norm, but combining this with a two-tuner DVR, I find that I get enough good stuff recorded that I never end up watching live TV. Admittedly, Boston has more options than most areas of the country since there are two major PBS stations, a couple independents, and UPN, WB, and PAX affiliates in addition to the big four networks.
I've tried using a similar analog antenna, and can only get 4 channels to look good. The HDTV channels seem to be far easier to pick up than the analog ones, and I hope people don't dismiss over-the-air HDTV based on their experience with analog broadcast. In the Boston area, the following site has a good description of what's available (except that it doesn't mention most of the subchannels):
http://www.bostonradio.org/radio/tvdial.html...and the rest of the station info I used was at:
http://www.antennaweb.org
http://www.checkhd.com
http://www.titantv.com
http://www.hdtvpub.com
I do miss some of the cable channels, but having so much archived HD stuff almost makes up for it. A friend of mine claims that if cable had come out in the 40s/50s and broadcast in the 70s/80s, rather than the other way around, we'd think of broadcast as the higher end technology. This clearly wasn't true before HD, but now I'm not so sure. The holy grail would be if some cable networks started jumping ship and doing HD broadcast. I wonder whether a business case could be made?
A note on the many comments about proprietary formats: The TV shows are recorded in "dvr-ms", but that is just a wrapper on mpeg2 that is easy to remove. Then you have basic MPEG files that can be edited, burned to CD/DVD, or shared on the network for others. Even without removing the wrapper you can burn to DVD and play on other computers that have Media Player 10. MS recently released an update so that Media Extenders ignore the copy protection flag that HBO, etc use. Overall, I'm very impressed at how open the TV and Music functions are to other formats (not so with the video viewer, it's terrible!). I have parts that I planned to put together into a Linux DVR, but am considering just making another MCE box. I know that won't be popular here, but the drivers are barely ready right now (I don't have time to be on the bleeding edge), and Windows MCE is far less proprietary than I expected.
Slashdot Mirror
graphedit, which I gather came with the DirectX SDK but is available by itself if you search. See this thread: http://www.thegreenbutton.com/community/shwmessage .aspx?ForumID=42&MessageID=48918&TopicPage=6
I think over-the-air HDTV the next "killer app". I wouldn't have considered it a few months ago, but I recently needed a new PC and paid a little more to get one of these WMCE PCs just to see what it could do. I got an ATI HDTV All-In-Wonder for a 2nd tuner, which can only do over-the-air (fine with me, because I'm too cheap to pay for good cable/satellite). In suburban Boston with the small indoor antenna that came bundled with the $150 HDTV card, I can get 16 over-the-air HDTV broadcasts (including subchannels), though a few are not stuff I would ever watch. They are all reliable and look great. Even when showing analog content, they look far better than my analog cable channels. My viewing habits are perhaps not the norm, but combining this with a two-tuner DVR, I find that I get enough good stuff recorded that I never end up watching live TV. Admittedly, Boston has more options than most areas of the country since there are two major PBS stations, a couple independents, and UPN, WB, and PAX affiliates in addition to the big four networks. I've tried using a similar analog antenna, and can only get 4 channels to look good. The HDTV channels seem to be far easier to pick up than the analog ones, and I hope people don't dismiss over-the-air HDTV based on their experience with analog broadcast. In the Boston area, the following site has a good description of what's available (except that it doesn't mention most of the subchannels): http://www.bostonradio.org/radio/tvdial.html ...and the rest of the station info I used was at:
http://www.antennaweb.org
http://www.checkhd.com
http://www.titantv.com
http://www.hdtvpub.com
I do miss some of the cable channels, but having so much archived HD stuff almost makes up for it. A friend of mine claims that if cable had come out in the 40s/50s and broadcast in the 70s/80s, rather than the other way around, we'd think of broadcast as the higher end technology. This clearly wasn't true before HD, but now I'm not so sure. The holy grail would be if some cable networks started jumping ship and doing HD broadcast. I wonder whether a business case could be made?
A note on the many comments about proprietary formats: The TV shows are recorded in "dvr-ms", but that is just a wrapper on mpeg2 that is easy to remove. Then you have basic MPEG files that can be edited, burned to CD/DVD, or shared on the network for others. Even without removing the wrapper you can burn to DVD and play on other computers that have Media Player 10. MS recently released an update so that Media Extenders ignore the copy protection flag that HBO, etc use. Overall, I'm very impressed at how open the TV and Music functions are to other formats (not so with the video viewer, it's terrible!). I have parts that I planned to put together into a Linux DVR, but am considering just making another MCE box. I know that won't be popular here, but the drivers are barely ready right now (I don't have time to be on the bleeding edge), and Windows MCE is far less proprietary than I expected.