Chris, Internet Explorer 7 Overwriting Album Art with Black JPEGs?

I don’t know if it’s IE 7, but on my Vista box some albums have black cover art no matter how hard I try to set it to set it to something else.

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There have been recurring questions about our re-design on the beta newsgroups. And yes, I know a lot of users liked our old Start Menu model which consisted of a homepage containing links to experience specific homepages. However, our homepages were bursting at the seams. For many homepages, we could no longer add any more buttons on the left hand side. For many locales (i.e. Germany) the string containers on those pages weren’t large enough to support the longer text. For many OEMs and third party add-ons they did not like how far away their applications were from Media Center’s core experiences. And so we sought to re-design the Start Menu to address some of those concerns.

To respond to one of the threads I pinged one of our lead designers to get his thoughts on our redesign. This is what he wrote:

There are three key decisions we made in Vista that dramatically change the
way MCE 2005 worked from the start (pardon the pun).

1. Content is king - We want to get you to your content quickly and leave
   you in your content. This means less navigating around multiple home pages
   and menus to get you to what you want. It requires more work on the user’s
   part to find the right link at first but the end result is greater control
   in the long term.
2. Context is king - To reduce the amount of navigation up and down the UI
   hierarchy the Start menu is now context sensitive. The Beta version doesn’t
   reflect this yet but future versions will allow the Start menu to be
   “sticky” thus allowing you the ability to transverse the current experience
   easily and more efficiently within your current experience.
3. Vista is more scalable - The start menu and galleries accommodate partner
   integration and expansion better than MCE 2005. We can expose the user to
   richer content in context of your experience.

Over time Vista MCE will grow and accommodate user needs better.

And I agree with many of you that the new design isn’t as simple as the old design but the more you use it the more I think you’ll find that as our designer points out above, it is much more powerful. Now are we making the right trade off between simplicity and powerfulness? I think we are but we don’t base decisions like that by just listening to our designers, program managers and developers (someone on the newsgroup asked if our product was designed solely by develoeprs). We also have a large usability team who validates the decisions we as a group make on real end users (most of whom have never used MCE before) to ensure that we are indeed making forward progress.

In the end I hope you will all come around to liking the changes if you don’t already. If you don’t, well, there’s always MCE 2005 :).

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If you’re having issues with Realtek audio drivers disappearing from Windows Update try this driver.

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Krunker.com has a lot of screenshots of Media Center in Windows Vista if you’re not running the beta, Windows Media Center Preview in Vista Beta 2:

Windows Media Center is arguably one of the best home theater personal computer user interfaces out there today.

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In his post, Windows Vista screencasts, Long Zheng, has a video of MCE in Vista [mov].

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Looks like you can now: Download Windows Vista Beta 2.

Download it, install it and send us feedback either via newsgroups, blog comments, or by emailing us.

And for what it’s worth, I’m running beta 2 at home in my living room.

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We added a new feature in Media Center for Vista, called Favorites. Basically, Media Center remembers what channels you spend the most time watching. So say you’re like me and spend a lot of time watching HD channels and you decide to check out your favorite list.

First, pull up the guide:

Next, invoke the context menu on it by pressing More Info on the remote, or CTRL-D on the keyboard, or right clicking with your mouse.

Once you select ‘filtered guide’ on the context menu you’ll see some more options:

Selecting ‘Favorites’ will narrow the guide down to your favorite channels, and for me those are all HD.

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Ed Bott over at ZDNet takes a look at Windows Vista Media Center in: Vista Media Center: Ready for the living room?. Ed starts off with some praise for our previous release:

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is decidedly un-Microsoft-like. For starters, it has a gorgeous interface. It’s a poster child for usability, actually beating TiVo at its own game. It’s fast. And, at least in my household, it’s been surprisingly, almost shockingly reliable.

But then he wonders, will we ‘ruin a good thing?’ Of course not :). For instance the typo on the copyright screen has already been fixed in later builds. He also points to how we handle music albums without cover art:

One glitch that mars the otherwise stellar appearance is the all-caps text that acts as a placeholder for missing art. It’s especially jarring when the movie or album or TV program has a long title that fills the box with ugly text.

I’d disagree. I have a number of albums for which I don’t have cover art and if I had to choose between us putting in a placeholder cover art icon for those albums or putting those titles in, I’d choose the titles. Otherwise I have to give focus to the album in order to know what it is.

Moving on to performance, I’m glad to see that our performance improvements to the music library resulted in an actual improvement for Ed.

In Vista, Microsoft says the performance of searches should be dramatically improved, thanks to the improvements in Windows Media Player 11. I loaded up roughly 15,000 tracks in the library and tried a few searches. The results appeared almost instantly, a huge improvement over Media Center Edition 2005.

Ed also picks up on a bug that really bugged me in MCE 2005:

Unfortunately, both the Album Artist and Artist views in Vista suffer from a bug that has been around for years: entering a letter or two should jump to the first artist whose name begins with those letters, but the jumps don’t work as they do in Album or Genre view.

This will be fixed.

Update: Ed also has an extensive gallery of MCE screenshots.

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Computer World, Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won’t Like About Windows Vista: 6. Media Center isn’t all there and falls flat.

The author’s primary compliant is that live tv isn’t working on beta 2 with his graphics card. I can understand how this would drive a user crazy, but I don’t believe that you should fault Media Center for an issue that we will surely resolve before shipping.

If we put that aside what else does the author have to say:

The important issues with Media Center are that it needs more content, should be easier to install and configure, and must be 100% reliable.

Needs more content? I don’t think I understand that issue. Media Center will ship with a small amount of sample content. Just enough to give the user a sense of what Media Center can do, but not so much that it interferes with their content, once they have content on their machine. Though I have feeling his issue isn’t about the amount of sample content… ?

Should be easier to install and configure. I disagree about installation, since Media Center comes pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate. Though on configuration I totally agree, it should be simpler, but it’s a hard problem to simplify. …No promises but we may see some changes that come in after beta 2 to further simplify our configuration.

Must be 100% reliable. Totally agree. My Media Center 2005 machine rarely gets rebooted (no more than once every three weeks) and it runs 24×7. I completely expect Windows Vista Media Center to have or surpass that same level of reliability.

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In Windows Vista a number of ‘casual games’ designed for Media Center are being shipped by default:

Check them out in beta 2:

• Chess Titans
• FreeCell
• Hearts
• Mahjong Titans
• Purple Place
• Solitaire
• Spider Solitaire

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