Bugs? No,… By design.

In my most recent TweakMCE post I said that two things requested were actually products bugs, when they are in fact not and we have no plans to change what’s already in the product.


A random slideshow does not start randomly


I’ve since found out that this is by design. Since it takes a few seconds for Media Center to generate the list of random pictures to display we display the first available photo in the top most folder so that you’re not starring at a blank screen waiting for the sildeshow to start. One note here is that if you start a random slideshow in a folder with no subfolders the first photo displayed will be random.


Update: We’ve talked more about this internally and will look at improving this for Windows Vista.


No videos list view


This is also by design; we intentionally do not provide this view since we can offer a rich thumbnail view of your videos. Though, we understand that if you have long filenames and non-descriptive thumbnails it can be hard to tell which video is what without rolling over them all.

Editor in chief of Wired Magazine plugs MCE on his blog

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, and originator of the Long Tail meme, praises Media Center, Friday Fanboy: The Media Center PC:

The cool thing about the latest (2005) version of Windows Media Center is that it can run in the background of a regular PC. So as far as my wife is concerned, it’s just her standard workhorse PC, sitting in the study. But while she’s doing email and such, it’s recording TV on a 400 gig hard drive or streaming it to TVs around the house.


I too am really looking forward to more long tail content for my Media Center.