Well, DUH! Microsoft has always been all about mediocrity. Why in the world would you expect them to be up to date?

I really wanted it to be good. I switched over from an expensive Tivo/Comcast setup to a cheap MCE/Dish Network setup in the hopes of getting:
A) An interface as nice as the Tivo, if not nicer (because of keyboard entry, etc)
B) The ability to play downloaded content, not just recorded TV
C) A lower monthly bill
D) “Free” MCE extras like picture viewing, etc.

I did get C & D at the following cost:

1) My [Dell] MCE freezes with a blue screen (not a “bluescreen” but a fully blue screen) and requires reboot. It happens about once a week. So when I decide to watch TV, also approximately once a week, I usually have to reboot the machine. I am able to improve the watch/reboot ratio by watching TV more often.
2) When I restart my MCE, four to six popups come up (“Your system is rebooting after a crash” “An AntiVirus update is available!” “A Windows Update is available!” etc.) and as various system services load it takes almost 30 seconds for me to get to the main TV menu. At this point I typically scan through recorded TV shows looking for something to watch.
3) After checking through 10 programs and finding that they’ve all recorded the wrong channel due to flaky interaction between the MCE remote emitter and the Dish Network box, I give up and decide to watch live TV.
[[4) Occasionally I find that a mistuned channel has invoked my favorite Dish Network feature: if you go to a channel you don't subscribe to, it puts up an error which can only be cancelled from buttons on the box itself. During this time, all remote entry is ignored. As a result, I have recorded a week's worth of this error. This is, of course, not MCE's fault but rather the fault of some sadistic shithead at Dish.]]
5) The TV guide is actually pretty good! Too bad I can’t tune in the right channels because of aforementioned remote issues. Figuring that some of the happy people on “The Green Button” *must* be Dish subscribers, so it *must* be possible to get this setup working, I attempt to fix my remote’s timing. The setup wizard proceeds to send me through a long setup process just to *get* to the point where I can adjust the remote code through an infuriating series of button presses, which inevitably don’t work reliably because the remote connection itself is unreliable. At this point I remember that the Wizard sucked just as much the last times I tried to fix the remote, and I stop trying, and decide to watch a movie or TV show I’ve saved on my hard drive.
6) But I can’t, because my system doesn’t have proper codecs for watching anything in either a) a non-Microsoft format or b) the proper aspect ratio (I will grant that it gets the latter right much more often than Windows Media Player, though.) I think I can probably access saved AVI movies over the network but they are displayed in a file explorer-like view. If I’d like a better interface, I can install a plug-in called “My Movies” which grants me access to Movie Information & cover art if I consent to run an ugly VB application which cannot fit in on my TV’s 640×480 maximum screen resolution and requires me to click something like four buttons and wait 30 seconds *per movie*.

Finally, I give up and walk downstairs to my basement. There, I turn on my XBOX Media Center (not Extender), an application written by a worldwide distributed team of free source communists which somehow has never once failed to accurately render any movie I’ve thrown at it, including archived disk images stored on a remote share, etc. I browse my movies with cover art (retrieved with one button press) and play it, then turn off my XBOX when I’m done.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have TV tuner, so I don’t watch anything but movies any more.

Anyway, I’d like to thank the Media Center team for completely eliminating my unnecessary TV habit. As a result, I no longer have to sit in front of a blurry PC screen with two remotes, a keyboard, and a mouse, desperately hoping that I will be allowed to watch a show that aired sometime last week… At least, not until I hear a stream of confused expletives from upstairs indicating that my fiancee needs my help to turn on the TV.

One comment I would have about your frustrations is that the product is probably better than most inasmuch as its an “out of the box” product. Its easy for TiVo to get a product working since they control the hardware, etc. Microsoft has to get their MCE product to work on so many different products, etc. Sometimes I’m amazed Windows boots at all given how many systems it works on.

I’ve played around with Meedio, which is a great product, but it certainly wasn’t a “just install it and done” product. What MCE does it actually does. So no HDTV recording or streaming – but it doesn’t say it does that. But it does record OTA HD, does support multiple tuners, etc. Out of the box, very little customr work.

That said, yes Microsoft does need to step up a bit. There are several items – like digital content streaming to extenders, HD STB recording – that really shouldn’t be so difficult to implement. Of course some of them, like I point out earlier, have nothing to do with the MCE product limits but the cable vendor limitations

Always enjoy reading your column though!

Then to view the slideshow just use the regular ‘My Picture’ slideshow option in Media Center to view a slideshow of your ‘Flickr Favorites’ folder.

Or do you have other features/requirements in mind?

It’s always a fine line b/t becoming a basher vs a cheerleader, but I think that people understand that your voice is coming from frustration over a product that has SO much potential and has literally gone nowhere over the past year (it looks like rollup 2 isn’t going to give us anything to cheer about, go to page 24 for Accident’s write up of the OEM chat http://www.thegreenbutton.com/community/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=41&MessageID;=124492&TopicPage;=24) with another year to go (Vista) before anything interesting could “potentially” be released.

As a function of this and due to additional frustrations with DirecTV’s lack of an avail HD DVR for me (I wasn’t able to get waivers for anything other than CBS and ABC), I am actually going to Comcast cable (I’m in the Bay Area as well) for the first time in 7 years. I am not sure if I have the technical chops to get the firewire ‘hack’ to work, but I may give it a shot. The conclusion that I have come to is that I will just have to drop back and punt for the next year, while the issues hopefully get figured out. That being said, I do not have a lot of faith that it will get done to our mutual satisfaction since no one is standing up to the content providers and explaining to them that maybe a business model tweak might actually be beneficial.

In any event, I just wanted to say that I appreciate your voice, even if terse at times, because I think that your requirements (an HDTV-capable DVR, a music library that works with loads of files, etc.) are those items that are critical to MCE’s success. Here’s to hoping that the shake up will get us there sooner rather than later.

Teamills (a.k.a Mike Mills)

On a slightly related topic, I’m wondering if you’ve had a chance to try out the firewire hack for MCE. Supposedly allows you to record HDTV on MCE (well, that’s the net effect anyways). I have no way to test it myself but thought you might be just vocal enough about your HDTV needs to give it an honest try and let me know how it works.

Linked here: http://www.thenears.com/archives/165/

Pete