It is typical of the complaints of US-centricity that when an ideal opportunity comes along for Microsoft to be part of, and fully support a new initiative, they are nowhere to be seen – and I have searched!

What I refer to is the FreeSat service, soon to launch in the UK, and which seems to have been in development for about two years. This will allow broadcasters who want to provide free-to-air programming a satellite based route to their customers, together with an associated free EPG.

Most importantly this will allow the broadcasting of HD content by BBC, ITV, and other UK broadcasters who are currently unable to offer HD content via terrestrial digital broadcasting , due to bandwidth limitations.

Why did Microsoft not get on board with this? I don’t see why you can’t allow the FreeSat EPG to run alongside the current guide for DVB-T, maybe with some sort of tab or menu to allow access to multiple guides associated with different tuner sets? Oh – and of course we need integrated support for the codecs used by DVB-S2 based HD.

At present you can buy the DVB-S1/S2 capable cards, and use a patch to fool Media Center into treating them as DVB-T cards, but can’t then use real DVB-T cards alongside. And though you can view SD content which uses MPEG2, there is still no way to view HD content. Instead you have the nonsense of having to leave the Media Center environment to run other software to do this.

Microsoft – please get your act together on HD outside the US.

Fred

In XP MCE videos are just folders in the registry, now they are a part of the WMP library, this is a horrible solution if you have many computers with shared folders that you want to access on the Media Center pc. The layout of the video “pages” are horrible aswell, the old MCE would display the filname under the preview, and that is gone (Imagine a full season of tv shows ripped from dvd and all previews show the same studio logo, useless) MS just assumes that everyone is happy with the WMP library and give no other options.

Switching to (and back from) the “category” view in the tv guide was better on MCE

var sbtitle6260=encodeURIComponent(“6 Month Vista MCE Report Card”); var sburl6260=decodeURI(“http://www.missingremote.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1925″);……

I bought Vista Home Premium a couple of weeks ago to use its MCE on a media PC. However it turns out that it doesn’t support DVB-Subtitles. That makes it useless for digital TV in Denmark and most of Europe.
I’m now considering changing to a Linux based media center, that has support for DVB-Subtitles.

Several items are preventing my from upgrading to Vista:

1. No digital cable support without purchasing a whole new machine from a large OEM using OCUR. Furthermore, there is no unencrypted digital cable support for local digital/HD stations. ATSC over-the-air isn’t the answer for many potential customers.

1a. I’ll also voice a concern for my international friends. Very little seems to have improved for them.

2. No native HD-DVD / Blueray support or playback. In fact, the overall “high-definition” story is extremely murky. Very little has been officially said about exactly what a customer needs to build a “full-fidelity-output” machine.

3. No DVD library support. I’m talking about the honest person who wants to rip their DVDs that they purchased legally to a server, for private household use.

4. I like the new UI, but I do not like how it searches and catalogs media. MCE 2005 had a much more predictable model.