Entries Tagged 'Windows Vista' ↓

Chris Lanier has put together a Vista Media Center CableCARD FAQ. It’s filled with great information.

Here’s my short version: Too expensive, too flaky, too restricted.

The idea of going back to Comcast makes me break out in a cold sweat. Maybe DirecTV will finally have its Media Center tuners out at the end of this year?

Five months after RTM, Microsoft has released the April 2007 Cumulative Update for Media Center for Windows Vista.

You’ll find several bug fixes and a few improvements, including Online Media support for 64-bit systems. My experience with Media Center rollups has been good, but your mileage may vary. Robert McLaws says he had some problems with IE7 and Outlook 2007 after installing it, so caution is, as always, in order.

This one is being delivered as a Recommended update, so if you check Windows Update on a supported system (Vista Home Premium or Ultimate), you’ll see it in the list of available updates.

Over at ZDNet, I’ve just published a detailed first look at Windows Vista’s new Media Center. You can read the article here or skip straight to the image gallery.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with Vista’s Media Center. My main misgiving is the appearance of the dreaded “Restricted Content” error message, which occasionally plagues Media Center Edition 2005. A bug in Beta 2 means you’ll see the blue screen of DRM if you connect your Vista PC to a digital monitor with a DVI cable and then try to watch a copy-protected premium cable or satellite channel.

Supposedly, this bug will be fixed in RC1. But that’s small consolation to anyone trying to use Vista Media Center on a digital display today.

Go read the whole thing and let me know what you think.

The one thing you need to know about CES: Getting from point to point in Las Vegas takes more time than you can imagine. Everything’s spread out, and the traffic is nightmarish. That, in a nutshell, is why I didn’t make it to Bill Gates’ keynote last night. Fortunately, Joe Wilcox watched the webcast and provided an excellent summary:

The longest single chunk of his keynote focused on Windows Vista. What bothered me: how little new there was in the Windows Vista demonstrations. I’m beginning to realize that there may not be much more new for Microsoft to reveal about Windows Vista.

Windows Media Center got about as long a demonstration as Windows Vista. … this is the first event where I saw Microsoft really show off the new Windows Vista Media Center user interface.

I found to be most interesting part of the Media Center demo: Windows Live Messenger and the concept of “activities” that are not necessarily related to people. The demonstration revealed how an automated TV advisor could make program recommendations, show TV previews and even remotely schedule recordings on a Media Center PC via instant messaging.

The Media Center demo also focused on high definition, whether HD DVD or HD content downloaded to the PC–all capabilities coming later this year.

Digital media, especially HDTV, is going to be the big story of 2006, a fact that was abundantly clear from a short walk around one press event last night. The biggest crowds were gathered around booths showing off digital video solutions and display hardware.

Update: Robert Scoble and Engadget did play-by-play coverage. Thomas Hawk notes that 6.5 million Media Center PCs have now been sold, with 5 million of those going out the door in the last year. The official Microsoft release is here.

Chris Anderson (Wired magazine editor-in-chief and author of the The Long Tail blog-and-book project) is one of the first to get an Xbox 360. He loves it:

Given my interest in the Media Center PC as a Long Tail video platform, I was particularly interested in how well it worked as a Media Center “extender”, serving as the link between one of the TVs scattered around our house and the Windows Media Center PC running in the study that serves as our media library and DVR.

The simple answer is very well indeed.

I’ve got two first-generation Media Center extenders. Despite their flaws, they do an excellent job of streaming media around the house. The extender concept, I’m convinced, is the killer feature that differentiates Media Center from other platforms, and Chris Anderson has come to the same conclusion:

I suspect that the release of the Xbox 360 is going to be one of two breakthrough events that take the Media Center concept mainstream. The 360 is a mass-market device (the original Xbox sold 22m units worldwide, and the Xbox 360 will presumably do better than that) that is built from the ground up to distribute digital content around the house. Having a Media Center extender built into a hot videogame console will go a long way to legitimizing that concept.

The second breakthrough event will be the release of Microsoft’s next version of Windows, Vista, which will come with the Media Center technology as a default in the home version….

Between these two forces–the inclusion of Media Center software in most new PCs and the spread of tens of millions of Media Center extenders in the form of videogame consoles–it’s not hard to see the Media Center becoming the leading DVR/streaming standard in a few years. Its rise is also helped by the fact that it’s both a relatively open platform on which other companies can create software and services, and it supports more standard media formats than the closed-box DVRs of TiVo or DirectTV or the proprietary technology of cable company set-top boxes.

I never thought I’d say this, but by the standards in this industry Microsoft is actually looking relatively innovative (Apple is playing catch-up with Front Row, but until it comes up with its own version of the extender concept to distribute content easily to TVs around the house, it won’t have broad appeal).

What’s important about the Media Center is that it takes the DVR concept and extends it to all forms of content, whether broadcast or downloaded from the Web. By having a broadband-connected PC at its core, it’s by nature a full-featured connected device that can keep up with the pace of innovation in digital media online. If the Xbox 360 and the new content marketplaces of its associated Xbox Live service continue to take off, we really could have the beginnings of a Long Tail platform that could challenge broadcast TV.

Provocative reading.

Guess I’ll start saving my pennies for an Xbox 360 in the new year.

InfoWorld has a few more details on yesterday’s Microsoft/CableLabs announcement that CableCARD is coming to Media Center PCs in 2006:

Between now and next December, Microsoft and CableLabs will work with hardware vendors such as Dell Inc., Gateway Inc. and Toshiba Corp. to make sure their Windows Media Center PCs and notebooks support the hardware specifications for CableCARD modules equipped with Windows DRM. Once the computers are certified by CableLabs and are shipping, Windows Media Center PC users can get cards from their digital cable providers that plug directly into their computers that give them direct access to whatever cable programming they purchase.

Does this mean that CableCARD-ready Media Center PCs will only be available from name-brand PC makers? If so, this is an unwelcome step backwards. The best news of last year was Microsoft’s move to make OEM copies of its Media Center software available to enthusiasts rather than forcing them to buy pricey name-brand systems.

The ideal solution will allow users on any Windows PC (assuming it meets the Media Center specs) to upgrade to Windows Vista, add a compatible TV tuner and CableCARD decoder. Expect screams of anguish if people buying high-powered PCs in the next year discover that there’s no CableCARD ugprade path.

Chris Lanier picks up my complaint about the high price of an Xbox 360 for non-gamers and adds:

At this point, Microsoft needs to be pushing OEM’s to get sub $200 standalone v2 Extenders out. I don’t want to buy an Xbox 360 for every room in the house! I want a single Xbox 360, and then 3-4 standalone Extenders! The perfect price point for standalone Extenders is just around $150, and I think it’s very possible with existing technology to provide the product at the right price.

Exactly.

In the comments to Charlie Owen’s post on the Media Center code in Windows Vista, a commenter asks:

Here’s a simple question that hits at the heart of things, I think: have you ever, EVER gone to someone’s house and seen them sort their CDs by album title? When you go to a record store and look in the jazz section, is it EVER organized by album? No on both counts: people organize around artists, even if by artists within a genre. So why in the world is MCE focusing so much on albums, other than the pretty graphics?!? Why, when going to My Music, do we see 27 tiny pictures rather than a list that will help us quickly find what we want to hear?

In the current version of Media Center, you can sort by artist or by album. You can also right-click to display the album view as a list rather than a bunch of album covers.

I think the overall point is a good one, though. I have about 1200 albums in my Media Center collection and navigation is a major pain.

More on this later.

Microsoft’s Charlie Owen has an excellent response to Paul Thurrott’s recent “review” of a beta release of Windows Vista. Charlie’s post is long and detailed and gives an excellent flavor of how the development process works. He also calls for comments from people who are using the Windows Vista beta and from those who are merely looking at screen shots in these articles. This is your chance to provide feedback at a time when that feedback can make a real difference.

One point that Charlie makes deserves a wider audience:

[W]hile Windows Vista build 5231 does give you a sneak peek into Media Center it’s not what we consider to be the ‘best foot forward’ build. Take anything you see, hear or experience yourself with regards to Media Center with a grain of salt until it is actually launched. That’s when the all of the features will be in place and you will get a true sense for the user experience look and feel. In the meantime, keep the feedback coming on pre-release builds.

Paul’s so-called review appeared at the same time as another longish article in PC Magazine. In both cases, I am baffled at the use of the word review. The point of a review is to help you make a decision as to whether you want to buy or install a product, just as the point of a movie review is to help you decide whether you want to see a new film or skip it and spend your money on another release.

Windows Vista Build 5231 is an interim release that is available only to invited beta testers and developers in the MSDN program. If you’re in either of those categories, you have access to dedicated newsgroups and other places where you can gather information and exchange opinions with people. You also understand that this is an interim version of a beta release, which means, by definition, that the software is incomplete and is being distributed so that testers can provide feedback on specific features.

I don’t bother to write detailed posts on interim versions, because they have no value to the people who visit this site. If you’re capable of downloading the beta builds, you don’t need me to tell you about them. If you aren’t an invited beta tester, why should I waste your time telling you in excruciating detail about a product you can’t buy or use, and which is going to change dramatically in the next two months, when the public beta will probably be released, and in the next year, when the final version will be ready.

Charlie’s post is really good. Read it, and if you think he’s wrong, tell him. Your feedback can actually have an impact on the final version of Windows Vista, which makes it well worth reading.

As for “reviews” of software you can’t buy or use, why waste your time?

Sean Alexander points to the joint Microsoft/Intel announcement that they’ve thrown their weight behind the HD-DVD format. That decision unlocks at least one new feature in the Windows Vista version of Media Center:

Managed Copy is a guaranteed feature within HD DVD that gives consumers the freedom to make copies of their discs to a hard drive or home server, including Media Center PCs, and enjoy them in every room of the house over their home networks. HD DVD discs also will allow copies of the movie to be played on portable devices.

That adds some detail to the rumors published earlier this month that hinted of DVD-copying capabilities in Windows Vista. Looks like you’ll be able to copy DVDs from the newer HD-DVD format only. (And no, let’s not discuss DRM here. I’ll save that analysis for another post on another day.)

Thomas Hawk is concerned whether the copies will be of HD quality:

I’m assuming (hoping) that when copies are made to your Media Center PC that they are of the same high quality format as the original DVD. If this is the case, and the discs, according to Sean, will be 30 Gigs at launch, then say 50 DVDs for the kids at 30 gigs could take up an awful lot of storage. 1.5 terabytes to be exact.

The alternative would be to have the copies stored be inferior non HD versions of the movies which would be smaller but this is also less exciting to me because I’m a nut for HD quality.

Not every DVD uses every bit of capacity. I suspect that by eliminating DVD overhead and using slightly better compression, you should be able to copy a HD-DVD in an average of 20GB, which means those 50GB will need a terabyte of storage.

A terabyte or two sounds like a lot right now, but leap two or three years into the future and the size and costs will not be so intimidating. In 1992, I paid $1000 for a 1GB drive. Coincidentally, that was the average cost calculated by one industry source. (PDF report here.) Costs of storage are going down 45% per year, on average. Today, the cost of a gigabyte of storage is about $0.42, and by 2007, when Windows Vista should be starting to hit its stride, a terabyte drive should cost $130. By 2008, you should be able to get 10 TB of storage for about $700. That will be enough to hold 500 DVDs. Will there even be 500 HD-DVD titles at that point?

Now, if past performance is any indicator, Thomas will have a very, very large collection of digital video - larger than 99% of the population at large. But even a 500-DVD collection should be manageable on a high-end consumer system by the time Windows Vista hits the mainstream.