Month: April 2005

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The Windows Media Center Show – Show 3

Ian Dixon: The Windows Media Center Show – Show 3 Ian Dixon’s Windows Media Center Show – Show 3 is up and available for download now. I haven’t listened to it yet but plan on listening to part of it on my way to work this morning on my new Audiovox SMT 5600 Smartphone.

Thomas Hawk gets a mention on the show and he interviews Microsoft’s Charlie Owen. Definitely worth checking out.

Thanks Ian for putting together such a valuable resource for the Media Center community and keep up the good work!

Update: Listened to the first part of the podcast on the way in to work and it’s quite good.

Charlie talks a lot about advertising and why the Media Center platform is a good thing for advertisers. Although I’m sure the commercial skipping features of Media Center might not be viewed as entirely positive for content providers and advertisers, Charlie seems to believe that there will be new and interesting ways to advertise microcontent in a more selective and targeted way through Media Center and that ultimately a solution will come out that balances the consumer, the advertiser and the content provider (via DRM) in such a way that the product is a win win for everyone. Charlie mentioned that he thought you would probably see more advertising built into content like how game shows constantly remind you that they are “brought to you by…” as part of their actual show.

I’m kind of fine with this — I think. I just hope that we don’t see Microsoft following TiVo’s lead and blaring abrasive advertising at us when we fast forward and rewind.

Charlie also talks a lot about Online Spotlight and the growth that you are seeing here. He wouldn’t release names of upcoming partners but I’d suspect that you see more of this in the future.

Charlie mentioned that you can get podcasts on MCE through RSS reader NewsGator today on MCE (and I thought it was funny that Ian reminded him that NewsGator wasn’t the only MCE RSS reader).

Zetools a company that works on developing software for the Media Center platform is on the podcast as part of the interview with Charlie as well.

I still have the rest of the podcast to listen to but this is pretty good stuff.

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Two Tuners in your Media Center PC

Ed Bott: Two tuners in your Media Center PC Ed blogs about Peter Near’s report on the Hauppauge PVR-500 and about setting up his own MCE unit with dual tuners. At present I only have one tuner on my MCE machine — but then I’m only really using the television functionality to make DVDs for the kids, record music programming so I can strip out audio tracks and make .mp3s and for portable media on my laptop. My real heavy duty DVR functionality is handled by my DirecTV TiVo.

My DirecTV HDTV TiVo box has four tuners in it. Two analog and Two high def. Four tuners in one small box that includes a DVR. Of course, one small expensive box that includes a DVR and is nothing more than a DVR but recording conflicts have pretty much been eliminated in my household.

Ed says that his MCE set up works “extremely well” with two tuners although he does notice some picture degradation in some recordings and needs to investigate this more.

I’ve been thinking about upgrading my video card and mce tuner to a high def version to try out the OTA high def stuff. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good HDTV dual tuner card that has one input for non HDTV satellite and another input for an OTA HDTV antenna? And what’s the best video card to go along with it?

Ed really gets it right in the last sentence of his post, “But the real killer would be a CableCard-equipped HDTV-compatible dual-tuner card, which is, alas, science fiction at this point.” You can say that again Ed!