Comments on: Microsoft Wants Media Center To Fail…I Swear

By: DVR’s & PC Media Centers « Tech Management

DVR’s & PC Media Centers « Tech Management — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:23:51 +0000

[…] Microsoft Wants Media Center To Fail…I Swear > […]

By: I've purchased my first hardware! | MyiPhoneHome

I've purchased my first hardware! | MyiPhoneHome — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:51:35 +0000

[…] Microsoft Wants Media Center To Fail…I Swear […]

By: jh

jh — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:40:47 +0000

Just for the record TVToolbox Beta4 won’t even install on a TV Pack install.
jh

By: jh

jh — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:08:16 +0000

Yes I did loose scheduled recordings but then again I also had to change EPG providers in Australia because EPGStream.net seems to not work with the update. So the lost scheduled recordingins could have been from the EPG change. I am also concerned about the new WTV format because I use TVToolbox alot and i expect this will not work with the WTV format.

By: Paul Ellis

Paul Ellis — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:04:15 +0000

jh,
Thanks for the update on that. Did you lose all of your scheduled recordings after you applied the Fiji update? I had heard something about that. It also concerns me that no programs (especially Orb) understand this new WTV file format.

By: jh

jh — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:53:30 +0000

I have installed the update on an existing system and it works fine. However if a use a relatively dated tuner with it i find the system crashes a lot. Its an old external Hauppauge USB tuner.

Otherwise all seems good. i’m happy just to have support for more than 2 tuners to tell you the truth, EPG support for Oz would have been nice…
jh

By: BenDover

BenDover — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:42:35 +0000

Relax. Check for the TV Pack on your trusty bittorrent sources and just download it already. Jeez

By: Alfred

Alfred — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:21:09 +0000

You say in your article that “Microsoft is lucky my DVR options are so bad to begin with, but that won’t last forever.”, but your options aren’t bad. You can always get a TivoHD that has all the DVR functionality of Media Center and more.

By: Paul Ellis

Paul Ellis — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:01:10 +0000

Derek, you capture my feelings on this perfectly.

By: derek

derek — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:34:51 +0000

Agreed… MS is pathetic in how they’ve mismanaged VMC. The underlying technology is good, and nobody else has matched it (yet), but they seem bent on self-destruction by under-delivering features, massive delays, and abysmal marketing.

They’ve also screwed up the Extender model by limiting licensing, while ensuring that 3rd-party extenders are less capable than their own (xbox360 – which is functionally a good extender, but awful (and noisy) form-factor)

MS should have made Media Center a separate SKU rather than embedding it into the OS. People would have gladly paid for it, and eHome could have been a profit-center for MS instead of a cost-center that constantly has to justify its’ existance every fiscal quarter.

Cable & Sat support is pathetic (non-existant) largely because Cable-Sat industry has little confidence in MS, and MS does nothing to motivate them.

– Buy a new Vista PC to get dysfunctional CableCard functionality?…
– Buy a new Vista PC so I can have a mediocre software update?….
– Buy a new Vista PC to get dysfunctional Satellite functionality some time in the distant future?…

WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY THINKING???

MSFT stock has flatlined for the last EIGHT YEARS because of poor decisions like this.

By: xeallos

xeallos — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:41:47 +0000

Agreed, VMC is terrible. If you use it as an extender for your 360 you can utilize all sorts of weird “plugins” that are almost guaranteed to fuck up your installation, but allow you to do amazing things like browse a FlickR feed or set of tags from your living room, or get the local weather.

Unfortunately, the interface is sloooowwww over the 360 and again all of these plugins are incredibly buggy and half of them aren’t meant to be used outside the native PC – NOT on an extender like the 360.

You’re better off just using WMP11 off an XP install to share your media folders to stream divx/mp3 content, the speed and reliability is there in spades and you don’t have to deal with the crufty/slow VMC interface.

By: Paul Ellis

Paul Ellis — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:29:54 +0000

While I do wish it had the other features (especially the DirecTV support) I’d love the native QAM support (my tuner has a hack to do it, but it isn’t great) and the heterogeneous tuner support. They are features that arguably VMC should have had from the start.

By: Bob Caswell

Bob Caswell — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:09:25 +0000

So you mentioned what it doesn’t have (but what people were hoping it would have)… but what does it have that makes it so you’d want to upgrade?

Whatever the case, the delivery decisions do seem like a slap in the face to any existing users.