I’ve been asked a few times if installing the WMP 11 Beta will improve the performance of the music library in Media Center Edition 2005. Unfortunately the answer is no. However, if you install the Windows Vista Beta 2 you can see the improvements. I’d also love to hear from anyone who has compared the music library performance between MCE 2005 and Windows Vista. Did it improve? Did it improve enough?

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PC Magazine has a review of the Sony XL2 system + changer and gives it 4 out of 5 stars, plus an Editors Choice award.

The Sony VAIO XL2 Digital Living System ($2,699.99 direct) is an update to the slickly designed and unique VAIO XL1 system I looked at last year. It continues the company’s path toward Media Center nirvana. Like the XL1, the new XL2 is a MCE PC that easily replaces your TiVo, CD changer, DVD player, and more. It’s perfect addition to your home theater, particularly if you own an HDTV with an HDMI port.

I haven’t played with this system but was glad to read that:

This media changer is noticeably quieter than the first edition. It still makes noises when accessing discs but is much less disturbing in a living-room environment.

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In Windows Vista a number of ‘casual games’ designed for Media Center are being shipped by default:

Check them out in beta 2:

• Chess Titans
• FreeCell
• Hearts
• Mahjong Titans
• Purple Place
• Solitaire
• Spider Solitaire

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Chris Prillo has an excellent post giving us lots of feedback on Windows Vista. He even has a small amount of feedback for the MCE team:

The new Media Center software is amazing. However, the buttons to dig deeper into the different sections seem to be using stock images rather than actual thumbnails on your machine. Sloppy, or intentional? If intentional, why?

Here’s the button he’s talking about (we refer to it as a tile).

The stock photos in the Start Menu tiles are intentional. The reason we can’t generate the tiles based on actual content in your libraries is that it would severly impact the performance of the start menu because for each tile representing a library we’d need to crawl the library, extract thumbnails, resize them, turn them into a composite image, etc. all before we can render the Start Menu!

Originally we were disappointed that the tiles couldn’t be representative, but given how small the images are in the tile I don’t know how helpful it would be to actually have your collection represented by the tile. So in the case, I think we definitely made the right decision to trade design for performance.

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On the Windows Vista site Tony Northrup has an article on Digital Pictures in Media Center
for Windows Vista looking at some of the basic photo tasks that you can accomplish with Media Center:

Media Center reclaims something we could have lost when we switched from film to digital: gathering the family around the photo album. With Media Center, you can handle every step of the digital photography process without touching a keyboard or mouse.

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Bill Gates mentions Media Center in his WinHEC keynote the other day:

In terms of form factors for the Windows PC, one of the great successes over the last several years has been Media Center Edition of Windows. A year ago it was a little bit of a phenomenon, two years ago it really didn’t exist. It’s this year that we’re getting all of the elements to come together, the connections to the cable video, the satellite video, connecting up to those standards on a global basis, and people really can expect the PC to be the place where everything comes together, video over the Internet, where the innovation is great, but also the traditional video sources coming together into one place. So that energy we’ve put around Media Center has paid off in a very big way.

I couldn’t agree more, Windows Vista will really be the release where Media Center comes together.

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I’ve gotten some questions about how HD DVD and MCE 2005 work together. Unfortunately, MCE 2005 does not handle playing back HD DVDs natively. So how these two technologies work together is up to the OEM. For instance, on the Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV650 - AVPC Laptop, the OEM, Toshiba, has added a ‘Play HD DVD’ command to the MCE 2005 start menu. Clicking on it launches the InterVideo WinDVD application which does the actual playback of the disc. In terms of how remote control friendly the InterVideo app is, I’m unsure, since I haven’t actually played with this setup yet.

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I’m sure many of us were unable to attend Will Poole’s WinHEC keynote yesterday so I thought I’d quickly scan the transcript and see what was announced for Media Center. Here are some highlights:

• [MCE has] just been a breakout success for us. Today we’ve sold over 10 million copies with our partners of Media Center PCs, and we’re selling at a rate of over 1 million per month.
• One more Sideshow device, the last one here is this WiFi remote from Exceptional Innovation. This remote is used to control your Media Center PC. It can function as a voice over IP handset, and even as a portable music player. With Sideshow technology integrated into this device we’re able to access your media library from any PC in your house, and select songs for playback. You’re also able to see your program listings for your TV, and select shows that you’d like to record. So really some cool scenarios, and that’s whether the TV is on or off, and whether that PC is in the room that you’re in or in another room in the house. CEPro has an article with photos.
• What I can do now is I can actually watch and record the latest movies from premium channels like HBO right onto my machine in high definition. Previous versions of Windows let you record standard def over the air, now I can watch and record the high definition.
• Over a million hours of extended usage have been logged today on Xbox 360s.
• We’ve been working with several companies to have products available to for launch, and today we’re announcing the Media Center Extender Partner Program. What that program will do is, it will allow companies to have access to design information, documentation, and the necessary components to embed Extender functionality into devices like TVs, DVD players, set-top boxes, and digital media adapters.

In my opinion the biggest news is the announcement of a partner program for equiment manufacturers who want to build their own Extenders. They even showed a working design from Sigma Designs. So this should enable tons of new exciting form factors!

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Today we’re making Windows Vista Beta 2 available. See Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 Fact Sheet:

Microsoft Corp. has released Windows Vista™ Beta 2 to developers and IT professionals with Microsoft® Developer Network (MSDN®) and TechNet subscriptions, as well as to members of the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) and the TechBeta program. Microsoft will also make Windows Vista Beta 2 more broadly available in the coming weeks as part of the Windows Vista Customer Preview Program (CPP)

For those of you wishing to test out the Windows Vista version of Media Center this is definitely the best build to date. In fact, I’ve been running it at home as my primary Media Center for a weeks now and it works pretty good (my biggest compliant is that 5.1 audio isn’t working for me). But as always, there are a lot of ‘fit and finish’ issues with this beta release that will be fixed by RTM. Also, expect changes to the design. While this release is fairly representative of what you’ll see next January, later builds, like the one I run in the office have a lot of fixes and improvements that this public beta 2 build does not. That said, we’d still love to hear your feedback and answer your questions. Leave posts on this blog, or that of any of the other MSFT MCE bloggers as appropriate (for instance, UX/UI concerns are best discussed here and platform issues over at Aaron’s or Charlie’s), or leave a comment our beta newsgroups. There’s still some time left for us to react to your feedback and ensure we ship the best, most exciting version of MCE yet.

Update: For more information checkout the Windows Vista site.

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If you don’t have a tuner but want to turn on My TV because you have DVR-MS files from another source I setting this reg key equal to 1 will do the trick: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\TVConfig\iVideoSource

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