Paul Thurott on interm build
Paul Thurott has been pretty honest with his feelings about Media Center’s performance in the past so it is great to see him write some postive things about interm build 5536:
Windows Media Center shows, perhaps, the biggest performance improvement of any Vista component. The application almost pops to life and, using the “Express” setup option, can be in use almost immediately. I won’t be trying to put Media Center on my family’s Media Center PC again until RC1 hits, but it’s clear that something wonderful has happened here.
Yeah but he left out:
* No MHEG Support for Europe & Australia which is fro DVB-T digital text and interactive services
* NO DVB-S Support
* No proper guide population by reading the OTA guide for first 7 days
* No recording of whats in the TV Buffer if you press record and programme already started
* No simple controls of things like CROSS FADE ON/OFF for Music - have to go back to Media Player for that!
* No HD-DVD or BluRay playback
In short, criminal and once again Microsoft missed the boat.
If you dont want to put European features in and be for the US, then simple, dont get people hooked by launching into those locales!!!!
Media Portal - Grab the market and teach MS a lesson. Hate to say it, because I usually defend MS !
I’ve just wedged build 5536 on my Sony Vaio XL100 (called the XL2 in the US) and by golly it pretty much worked first time. It displays a picture now (Beta 2 was missing the drivers for the HDMI output) so you can see what you’re doing, and it found nearly everything except the Sigmatel sound drivers. Showstopper for me at the moment is the setup of Media Center doesn’t ask for what your TV input type is (cable, antenna, satellite) like MCE2005 does, it defaults to Antenna whereas I used to chose Cable under MCE2005 and fails to find any channels. Hmmm….
I’m running 5536 version of MCE on a 60″ Sony HDV, and it is stunning! Everything works perfectly and it is a pleasure to use. The MCE team really produced a winner on this one, and it is the sole reason that I’ll purchase Vista when it’s released.
but if you are in Europe or Australia MCE on Vista is a half baked product, coded for out of data analogue systems and poor coverage for DVB-T and non existant for DVB-S (unless you includes Hauppauge’s hack of DVB-T for getting DVB-S to work!).
Fine if you are in America………
Tried RC1.
I don’t think i’ll be buying Vista. Installed it and right away added music, album names and artist names are still too short and don’t scoll if they are longer. The next day i restarted the computer and it started rebuilding the library, took half an hour and during that time i couldn’t play music at all. Scanning for tv channels on a analog tuner and then sorting them out is still half a days work.
I think i know what the problem is, in another blog some dude from Microsoft said we should be jealous of Microsoft workers because they get to play around with the latest stuff. That’s the problem, you guys play too much with the new stuff and forget to get the basic functions working properly.