Charlie Owen and John Canning - Media Center exposed, Part II | TheChannel9Team

dotnetjunkie

you should sell these boxes with two or more remotes included Smiley

dotnetjunkie

You know, after having watched only a few minutes of this video I was already convinced that I need to buy a Windows Media Center.

After having watched half of the video, I now feel that I can no longer live without a windows Media Center.

And after having watched the complete video, I feel a strong urge to go out and tell all my relatives, friends, and every customer of the company that I work for, about these cool devices and sell a Windows Media Center to each single one of them! Smiley

dantheman82

Very interesting indeed. I do wonder Angel

how my 2 gb of pictures which are in a rather disorganized mess in Windows folders could be sorted in Media Center. Furthermore, same goes for music...

Oh, and one other thing...what are the minimum system requirements to build my own Media Center PC?

Thanks,
Dan

Manip

In Manip's opinion the MC-PC is ahead of its time. The hardware is just not ready yet.

For the general public to buy it you would need a ~

Price: $150-
CPU: 3Ghz+
RAM: 512Mb+
Video Mem: 128Mb+
Sound: High Quality
Ports: TV Out (Various Ports), TV In (Various Ports), Digital Out, Digital In
Note: 100% Silent, no fans at all

That might seem silly price/features wise today, but in two years? As I said when the hardware hits those specs the media centre PC concept will take off.

I wish the media centre stuff was a product instead of an OS. If it was something like Office or Visio I might buy it, but as it's an OS I no way am I going to be paying £80 again for some extra stuff.

The next generation should be sold as a product AND an OS so as to not exclude anyone.

Question: Where does the 'guide' information come from? With Tivo you have to pay them £10 a month for that...

Here in the UK we have Sky Digital, which is a digital Satellite set-top-box. It has built in games. Not like crappy card games but like tetris and various original games which are Designed to be played with your TV remote control. Can the media centre play simple TV remote games?

Couldn't the Media Centre PC be 'smart' and learn that you are using a low-quality device, and run a background service that in idle periods converts to low quality video?

With the portable Media Centre PC, what kind of programming bits can us VS2003 guys do? Would you need a special dev kit (which costs $$$) to develop applications for the portable version? I just ask because if I end up with a portable one at some point I want to know I can hack it.

gav
GuitarGav

Here in the UK a lot of people are now used to digital recording of TV via the Sky Plus set top box and service.
I doubt Sky would allow recording of their material on a Media PC as it would take revenues away from Sky Plus. However, it would be great if you could use Media Center to interface with the Sky Plus system.

It's also possible to copy shows from Sky Plus to video. It would be nice for Sky to add copy shows to My TV.

Since their set-top box is a PC this shouldn't be hard to do.

Support for DAB Radio would be great too. As well as playing, add scheduling and recording of radio shows.

And finally, how about allowing people to upgrade their existing XP installation to Media Center. Perhaps this could be via a 3rd party. For example, if Sky and MS (UK) work together, an "upgrade my PC to a Sky Media PC" would make it easier for consumers as well as increasing both companies market share.

I would certainly buy a Sky/Media Center extender to get them to work together, but couldn't justify to my wife in buying a new PC (I can get WMC as I'm an MSDN subscriber - but why scrub my existing Windows Setup?)

Thoughts?

Manip

gav wrote:
Here in the UK a lot of people are now used to digital recording of TV via the Sky Plus set top box and service.
I doubt Sky would allow recording of their material on a Media PC as it would take revenues away from Sky Plus. However, it would be great if you could use Media Center to interface with the Sky Plus system.

Well you would use the Media PC the same way you would use it with anything, plug the TV Out from your sky box into the PC and record the video output. You would then plugin the media PC into the TV. There is nothing sky could do to stop that.

You couldn't use Sky's TV Guide information at all and that is the main disadvantage of a media centre PC compared to Sky+ (You would have to pay someone like DigiGuide money for the guide information if you wanted it on the media PC end of things - you could still us the sky guide but not record via it).

Of course you couldn't change the channel via the media centre PC either. Unless you're creative, buy a infrared addon and write a program to use it to simulate the Sky remote (massive hack).

PS - Isn't Digital Radio already dead in this country?

Rossj

I'll buy one ... if you put it in XBox 2

GaryBushey
The blob in the upper right hand corner is my dog

The big problem I would have is with my HDTV I cannot get any over the air programming (due to where I am actually situated) but there does not appear to be any HD recorders from cable.

charlieo

A few quick answers to the questions...

dantheman82 --> ...how my 2 gb of pictures which are in a rather disorganized mess in Windows folders could be sorted in Media Center.

You can sort by Date or Name in Media Center and we use the file and folder structure My Pictures folder.

dantheman82 --> Furthermore, same goes for music...

Media Center uses the Windows Media Player Library to organize your collection.

For a more in-depth view into the Media Center feature set check out the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Reviewers Guide

Manip --> Where does the 'guide' information come from?

Guide data is licensed by Microsoft from third parties and provided to the end user free of charge (absolutely NO monthly fee for the guide).

Manip --> Can the media centre play simple TV remote games?

Yes (several are shipping today).

Manip --> Couldn't the Media Centre PC be 'smart' and learn that you are using a low-quality device, and run a background service that in idle periods converts to low quality video?

Sure. There are several utilities floating around which convert Recorded TV to WMV -- not sure if any of those use idle time for the conversion, but it's certainly possible.

Manip --> With the portable Media Centre PC, what kind of programming bits can us VS2003 guys do? Would you need a special dev kit (which costs $$$) to develop applications for the portable version?