SoftSled
Chris Lanier, No Streaming CableCARD Content to Other Windows PC’s:
Microsoft has decided to skip that side of the market (with some Microsoft employees not even knowing it’s been a wanted feature for the past four years) it doesn’t look very hopeful that it will be an addition to the platform anytime soon.
The eHome group and its management are well aware of the demand for SoftSled.
I take it no comment on the reasoning behind not addressing it? ;)
Chris
I’ll make a guess…
It’s because the eHome group never really intended for MCE to be a mainstream OS. This is obvious from the fact that MCE started as an OEM-only into the “recommend OS” on new PC’s. Huh? I think they envisioned MCE to be more like the XBox custom OS or Windows Mobile, a very specific OS for a very specific purpose. More of a “Media Embedded OS”. Then the market share wasn’t there so Microsoft marketing wanted to put MCE in front of people and suddenly it’s on every 17″ laptop out there.
Honestly I think the worst thing the eHome group ever did was break their OEM-only vows, because now people actually expect to be able to do things in MCE like you can do with a normal OS. Instead, due in part to the unholy union of cable companies and content providers, you now have a simulated “closed box” system basically embedded inside of an OS. With Vista MCE + HD + CableCard you now have the worst of all worlds. High PC prices with poor closed-system extensibility.
If they are going for the OEM’s then a SoftSled would be threatening, people will just stream from MCE to PC instead of buying their third-party extenders or fancy form-factor PC’s. Why shell out a $4,000 for a sleek HTPC when you can instead use a beefy but horrible looking PC upstairs and stream to a $100 SFF PC downstairs?
Hehe, I know they are aware. Just don’t know why they haven’t done anything about it yet. Or the lack of a direction for that matter. ;)
BTW: A single guy did something like this in less then six months in another opensource project. Not done yet, but promissing.
Well, this seems like one of the final nails in teh coffin for media center, particularly in Australia.
Having moved from the UK to australia this year, only to discover that he EPG doe snto work and the only way to get one is via some apparently leagally dodgy hacks.
This single feature missing means that many media centers are sold here without the consumer or vendor having any idea what it is for ? None of them comes with a TV card so there is not even an option for watch TV, and it suddenly becomes a ?? err why do I need a remote for it ?
Media center has been poorly marketed, its currently thoguth of as an enthuseasts operating system, and its design is for quite the opposite. A big problem with it is MS inherrant instability, how leaving automatcic updates on will eventually break you rmedia cetner, having it off will pester you with constant reminders.
The concept of media center is awesome, the extenders is what really won me over, as a concept its supperb. Howver having to resort to having multiple XBoxes when you do nto even play any of teh games is just ridiculous. There is a massive market out there that would happily pay for media center extender OS for PC. we all know that it can be done. In fact I am wondering if maybe we should be looking at Xbox 360 emulators as a work around ? or even old XBox emulators as they came with media center extender on disk.
hmmm
/me wonders off rubbing chin
It’s not that we don’t know (I’m one of the “management” folks on the MCE team) about the value of this kind of thing… it’s just a matter of which work you do when.
We totally believe in the principles you all are describing… and we’ve tried to release software updates quite frequently (one rev a year for each of the last 5 years). The work of getting this done isn’t insignificant, and we simply have to weigh it versus other features.
Keep the comments coming, though!
I just can’t see MS releasing a standalone software extender unless they price it to offset reduced sales of the XBox. You have to think their partners who will be producing the extenders wouldn’t like it either.
I do believe that MS will eventually offer this “in a form” as an update to Vista. That won’t hurt their 360 sales because no one in their right mind is gonna fork out the money for a new computer, or OS, just for this feature when they can buy a 360 for $300. And if they go that route it shouldn’t hurt their partners extender sales either.
I believe the best we are going to get from MS is a server slave setup where one MCE machine acts as a server and others are able to share it’s tuners and guide.
Well, there’s an $18 piece of shareware that does a pretty good job of streaming (and transcoding on-the-fly) from MCE 2005 and Vista. All you need a PC with IE on it.