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.

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There have been a few comments asking about what’s going on with HD DVD and Media Center.

First, to clear up the confusion about 32 bit vs 64 bit playback I point you to The Windows Vista Team Blog, Clarifying Windows Vista Support of Protected HD Content in 32-bit Systems:

The real deal is that no version of Windows Vista will make a determination as to whether any given piece of content should play back or not. The individual ISV providing the playback solutions will choose whether the playback environment, including environments that use 32-bit processors, meet the performance requirements for playback of protected High Definition content.

Secondly, what’s going on with HD DVD and Media Center? I was going to be working on that but was pulled off to work on something else. In my place Peter was the program manager and has this post about our support for next gen DVD formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray application extensibility in Windows Media Center. In short, we provide the extensibility mechanisms necessary for you to drop in your own playback application and have it called from Media Center.

Thirdly, our press release from WinHEC has some info, Hardware and Software Vendors Rally Behind HD DVD at WinHEC 2006

At the conference, Microsoft reiterated that Windows Vista will be shipped with the drivers, file system and other components necessary to support HD DVD playback.

So no, I’m not quiting because HD DVDs won’t play on 32 bit systems :).

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Thanks for all the emails and comments! Maybe I shouldn’t be leaving after all :).

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I’m back from vacation and have some big news to share, September 1st is my last day at Microsoft.

Now it’s certainly been a great two and half years. I came in fresh from university knowing very little and with the help of a great team, a fun product, and a regular yearly release cycle I’ve learned what it takes to ship software at one of the world’s greatest software companies. But it’s now time for me to move on. I’m moving on for a number of reasons. For one, in the back of my mind, working at Microsoft was a two year commitment. I knew while graduating that I wasn’t yet ready to run my own company, I needed to learn more. So I could either go to grad school or get some real world experience. Being pretty tired of school, Microsoft was naturally one of the best places to learn how to ship software. Secondly and most sadly is that I was no longer, or possibly never was, performing at the level that I should have been. There are a number of reasons for this. A number of my projects in Vista got cut and then my post-Vista work was continually held up but the whims of other teams. There also isn’t the incentive system in place for me to want to break outside the ‘meets expectations’ ranks in a meaningful way and so I never would step up and really take the initiative to control my own destiny. There’s a few more reasons but I’ll save blogging about those until a later date.

To be clear, I am not leaving because Microsoft isn’t a great place (it is, I love my team and my co-workers, I’m really going to miss them but thankfully I’ve made some great life long friends. However, Microsoft is just no longer the place for me and where I am in my career), I am not leaving because Windows Vista is going to suck (it’s not we have tons of people putting their heart and soul into it and I prefer using it at home than Media Center 2005), I am not leaving because we don’t support DVB-x/feature XYZ/etc (do your homework on the size of those markets and compare them to the markets we are pursuing, then figure out what the technical effort is to enter those markets and figure out how many people we have) and I am not leaving because I’m an idiot (though it would be funny if I did).

So while there have been a lot of departures recently mine certainly won’t result in me taking a year off (like Vic Gundotra’s), the news won’t break via the blogosphere (like Robert Scoble’s), there’s no news conference planned (like Bill Gates’), and this post won’t be Dugg or TechMeme’d. But maybe it should be? What is Microsoft doing to build and retain top notch young talent at the individual contributor level? How are they moving them up the ranks? (For those in the know about what this means, I was a ‘blue chip’ candidate and in the College Select program.. Anyhow these are some great ideas for my post-Microsoft blogging).

What does this mean for this blog? (Not that this blog is anything special, I hardly pay it the attention that I should). It probably all depends on if my Media Center gets repossessed :).

Keep using MCE, it rocks!

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After blogging about tags in Media Center I got some emails and comments about how the tags work in general. Fortunately the Pix Blog has started to discuss this:

XMP is an extensible framework for embedding metadata in files that was developed by Adobe, and is the foundation for our “truth is in the file” goal. All metadata written to photos by Windows Vista will be written to XMP (always directly to the file itself, never to a ‘sidecar’ file). When reading metadata from photos on Windows Vista, we will first look for XMP metadata, but if we don’t find any, we’ll also look for legacy EXIF and IPTC metadata as well. If we find legacy metadata, we’ll write future changes back to both XMP and the legacy metadata blocks (to improve compatibility with legacy applications).

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My co-worker Aaron has a post on Adding strips and tiles to the Windows Media Center Start menu in Windows Vista:

With the redesign of the Start menu, Windows Media Center for Windows Vista also includes a new way of registering applications and entry points to appear on the Start menu. It is possible to add up to 2 new strips to the Start menu using existing extensibility mechanisms in Windows Media Center, and each of those 2 strips can contain up to 5 tiles.

(Yes, I’m still on vacation)

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It’s been a fun last few weeks here but it’s time for some vacation time. I know, I haven’t earned it and that I really should be staying in Redmond to work on DVB-x :).

I’ll be back in the office August 20. In the meantime spend some time on theGreenButton.com. And if you’re interested in HD DVD I hear that Peter (who I handed the feature off to) will be writing an article on it and posting it to The Media Center Sandbox.

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I recently received an email pointing me to this thread about photo quailty in Media Center. Turns out in previous releases we were down sampling all photos to 1024×768 regardless of your resolution (clearly a bad thing to do if you have a 1080 display). The fix we have implemented in Windows Vista is to down sample the photo to match your resolution. We’re all wondering why we didn’t do that in the first place :).

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Thanks to a commentor who found this WinHEC 06 Presentation, Preparing For TV Beyond Windows Vista [PPT] by my co-worker (on the TV team) Bernhard. This Power Point deck lays out what our plans are for supporting worldwide TV standards. If you’re passionate about DVB-x, ISDB, etc, read this.

The deck doesn’t address why we focused on what we focused on for Windows Vista but it does show that we understand what standards are popular throughout the rest of the world, the challenges being faced and what we’re enabling in the future.

In the comments I’ve heard several concerns that while they won’t see the next version of Media Center until 2009. We can’t talk about future plans but historically the Media Center team has shipped a new version or major rollup every year.

I’d also like to point out that Media Center can’t be everything to everyone around the world. If a different program suits your needs then please use it. While I love Media Center if you can’t watch TV in it by all means use Media Portal (it’s built on .Net afterall!). Or if you require the stability and simplicity of a standalone CE device try a Tivo (though I sure hope you give Tivo hell for not even supporting DVD changers or non-US countries!).

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This is my favorite comment over the last week:

Matt - when MS made you a PM for the MCE application - have you considered that your not the right person for the job… Come on - I dont work in the television industry but I know what dvb-c dvb-s etc are…

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Your ignorance of the rest of the world standards and wanting of features just gives the impression of a 30 something guy who has never left the west coast of the USA. There is a big world out there….

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Seriously Matt - I respect your blog, but read some forums outside of the green button and read some blogs outside of the MS ones, look at some newsgroups - either learn what the people and the community want or maybe move on to the excel team, and let someone who knows more or cares more take the reigns….

Please read my bad decision post again and then read it again, and again.

Two things. Firstly, and unfortunately I likely can’t disclose how many program managers there are who work in eHome but the number is high. Very high. I am just one of a very large number of program managers who themselves are just a portion of our technical team. This means we each have highly specialized feature areas and are somewhat insulated from other technical areas. Secondly, there are two separate teams working on Media Center. There’s the core team of which I am a member and we have absolutely nothing to do with television or television standards. Then there’s the TV team who is responsible for those things. And so, yes, if I worked on the TV team I should likely know what DVB-x is, but I don’t.

And for the record I’m twenty something and have lived on the west coast for two and half years, and I have travelled the world, but spent my time outdoors and not indoors watching TV :P.

Please remember folks I blog because I enjoy blogging. It is not a part of my job. Many of the comments I’ve read recently posted here really take my enjoyment out of sharing with you what is happening. If you want me to continue sharing please show respect to both me, my weblog, Media Center, and Microsoft.

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