An annoying little Media Center TV bug

I’ve been running Vista Media Center for several months with a pair of digital cable (CableCARD) tuners. Every so often, I encounter a recording that misbehaves in a strange but predictable way. The symptoms for me are as follows:

When I play back the recording, it appears to have been truncated. A half-hour show might appear as if it’s only 5 or 6 minutes long. In actuality, it’s the full recorded length, 30 minutes, which you can confirm by looking at the file size or the file properties.

The navigation buttons on the remote control work until you approach the "phantom" length marker. In the case of a 30-minute program that appears to be only 6 minutes long, the elapsed time counter stops at 5:35 or so. But the program itself keeps playing, and as long as you don’t touch the remote it will continue to play till the end. If you do touch the remote, you’ll find yourself whizzing through the program to the end and you’ll need to start over.

It doesn’t happen often, but it’s an annoying bug, to be sure. In a lengthy and informative thread at The Green Button former Media Center team member Jessica Zahn (now working on the Zune team) acknowledges that the bug has been reproduced. Unfortunately, there’s no fix scheduled for delivery anytime soon. According to Jessica, in a post from last October:

We found the bug. It’s been fixed for our next release, but in my opinion, it doesn’t reach the very high bar for an update outside of the regular product cycle.

Probably this is a fairly unpopular answer, so to offer a little more transparency into our process, I’ll share a little about the sustained engineering process for Media Center (and Windows). I used to be the SE program manager for the TV team before I switched to feature development work.

Basically, to get a fix made out-of-cycle, it needs to affect a large percentage of Windows users - not just Media Center users, because we can’t target Media Center users only given that we ship in every copy of Home Premium and Ultimate. Since our update would affect all of those systems out there, just that alone makes it very difficult to do MC updates. So typically we need some other sort of pressure - OEMs stating they will lose sales or incur support costs as a result of the bug, or political or legal issues, etc.

Another way, though, is to prove sheer numbers. At this point, despite a handful of people reporting the bug, I’m not sure we have a large enough number of people experiencing this bug to bring it above that bar.

I understand the logic of not wanting to push out an update to every person running Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, given that only a fraction of a tiny fraction are going to hit this bug. It would be nice if the solution could be made available as a hotfix via PSS, though, or if it could be bundled into the next Media Center rollup package. Meanwhile, you’ll find some suggested fixes in this other, related thread at TGB.