I’ve received a lot of feedback on Media Center not supporting serial changers. While I sympathize with those wanting serial control because they’re currently cheaper, I believe that a firewire solution is superior. Why?

• They can store any type of optical disc in the changer (music CD, data DVDs with pictures/videos/music, video game DVDs) and the software that we or third parties build can then browse the changer and play back the DVDs as appropriate.
• No input switching is required when video playback begins
• RS-232 is dead. Many PC manufacturers are dropping support for it.

That said, I hope that the current DVD changer manufacturers work at cost reducing their existing offerings and I hope that more manufacturers enter the space in order to drive cost down through competition.

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I got an email from someone who is having a problem where one of their HD channels used to work but now they get a ‘No TV Signal’ blue screen. The answer here is:

Typically the reason this happens is that a broadcaster starts broadcasting on some other frequency, and we no longer receive the signal. We use a table that we get from [our metadata provider], that they get from the FCC, to know which channels are broadcast on which frequencies. When broadcasters change frequencies (either because they switch from a test feed to a production, live feed or some other reason), we don’t know unless the FCC knows and updates their database that [our metadata provider] gets data from. We don’t actually do “scanning” the way that a TV, or other TV applications, do.

If this happens to you submit your problem to Electronic Program Guide Issue Submission Form and we’ll work to get our tables updated.

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The other day I got an email pointing me to CoverFlow, CoverFlow aims to bring that aesthetic appeal to your mp3 collection:

The person emailed wondering if we’d adopted something similar in the future. While it’s impossible to rule out that we’d never do something similar I do have a bit of experience with similar UI. For instance, take a look at the queue management UI that I worked on for a demo of an Avalon Netflix application (click through for full size):

Now if you notice the black band has a queue control. It’s hard to illustrate this in a screenshot but if you mouse over the queue covers they expand out and show you the one you’re currently over. It’s almost identical to CoverFlow in feel. Now from that control you can select a movie and get the movie details. Alternatively you can view your queue full screen:

Again you can mouse over covers and they rotate into the foreground as you mouse over them.

We nicknamed this queue control the ‘accordion’ view. While I think it’s got some good ‘wow’ factor I don’t think it’s very usable. Why?

• It doesn’t expose enough information – I want to be able to see more than one full cover art at a time. For me this is a deal breaker. I need to see an album in the context of my collection.
• It’s not scalable – I feel this UI widget works for a small amount of albums or movies, but scale it up to 1000 or 10000 items and it will be very unweldly. Our biggest fear with the Netflix accordion widget was that for the demo it looked cool for 20 movies but for any more (it would have to support the max number of movies you can have in your queue) it just wouldn’t work.

For comparison here is Media Center’s default album view in Vista:

(Disclaimer: This screenshot is from the December CTP using my personal music collection and a lot can change between now and launch in terms of what you see here).

We’re showing album covers, so it has lots of visual wow, when you scroll through the album in focus is pulled out and metadata about it is displayed below, if we don’t have cover art we embed it in the cover art tile, and lots of covers are visible on the screen enabling you to see it in the context of your larger collection.

My biggest concern with our approach is that since we no longer show the titles under the albums you need to be very familiar with your cover art in order to know where you are and find what you’re looking for. For me a more useful view is going to be our albums by artist view:

Since I think of my collection artist first and then album.

For another comparison check out an example of how movie galleries will look:

I wish I had some screenshots of how other Media Center like apps handle galleries but don’t. Though here are some two foot examples:

What are your thoughts? Which do you prefer?

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