CEPro looks at the Sony XL1B2 changer
CEPro, First Install! Sony Vaio XL1B2 DVD Changer with 3rd-Party MCE:
But the best feature was the compatible 200-disc DVD changer with seamless MCE integration.
Julie talks to Kevin Buchanan about his experience with a standalone Sony XL1B2 changer and I’m glad to hear that they think the DVD changer is the best feature of MCE 2005 UR2!
…I agree the My DVDs and My Changer menu items are a little confusing. The My DVDs is a Media Center category, and My Changer is Sony’s category. To simplify things we were going to implement a navigateToPage function so that the My Changer category could link to My DVDs, but we ran out of time.
I’m a little baffled about the hard drive expandability issue. You should be able to swap out the two 160GB drive and put in up to three 500 GB drives which would give you more than enough internal storage (because the unit has 3 internal 3.5″ drive bays). And likewise, I’m confused about the Extender support issue, since the Extender should work with the XL2 just like it does with any other MCE on the market (maybe they’re hit a firewall or anti-virus issue?).
And streaming DVDs… We’d love to do it but the number of our customers who own DVD changers is a very small and a decreasing percentage of our install base. Plus, it’s only a matter of time before HD DVD and managed copy surpasses traditional DVDs.
Matt, you don’t think that if Microsoft were to market streaming of DVD’s then the percentage of Chagers would grow in the market?
HD DVD will not surpass standard DVD’s for years. It will likely be 2-3 years until there is a large market, and likely be at least 5 until they can even start to surpass DVD.
I know that Microsoft will be trying to promote HD DVD over DVD in their products such as Media Center since ya’ll have such a large vested interest with iHD and VC-1, but I still think Microsoft is making a mistake putting HD DVD in front of DVD this early in the game.
In 2004, there where over 1.2 billion DVDs sold! I don’t know the numbers for 2005, but based on the 1.2 billion in ‘04 I don’t think many will question that it will be larger then what HD DVD’s will be selling.
Anyway, I know it’s way to late for anything to change Microsoft’s strategy, but I think ya’ll are making a mistake by not committing more to DVD (especially when Microsoft technologies can be used to accomplish the streaming of current DVD’s)
Thanks!
Chris Lanier
I have the sony dvd changer and MCE Rollup 2. I have backed up some of my dvds and loaded them into the changer. The DVDID is changed when I back up the DVD to another disk. Is it possible to add the dvdid.xml file to the VIDEO_TS directory before I back up the dvd and place it into the drive so the metadata gets discovered when the dvds are loaded into the changer? I keep hearing about this option if I place the VIDEO_TS on the harddrive, but have yet to hear of a solution when loading them into the changer.