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Road Kill on the Convergence Highway: Three months with Windows Media Center
Page: 4/4
(2082 total words in this text)
(85031 Reads) 
DVR – Sort of
As a DVR, one tuner was just OK, with a second tuner working, it was still OK, provided you weren’t too picky about mouths moving at the same time words came out. Out with the snazzy Realtek integrated sound on the ASUS-A8V motherboard. In with an Audigy 2ZS to lessen the load on the AMD 64 3000+ processor. More gadgets. That cured the synch. The picture still was no where close to a vintage Tivo.
But it does keep track of the programs, important with a terabyte of disc. You can see all the episodes of a show grouped together. Movie posters retrieved from the net are nice. It seems dumber than Tivo about recording the same show repeatedly, even on the same day. It is definitely not a tosser as a DVR. I didn’t try the HDTV off air recording, since the mountain between me and the antenna in LA keeps the signal away. There would also not be much point to it, since HDTV playback was DOA.
Video Recorder – Hopeless
As a video recorder, for archiving tapes, you have to leave Media Center and tussle with one windows movie app or another. The one that comes with XP takes an hour to save a file that took an hour to import.
Well, maybe recording to DVD-R is better. Forget it. Media Center tells you to insert a recordable disk. You do. It tells you to insert a recordable disk. You do. It tells you again. The “You have ten seconds to drop your weapon.” Robocop School of Software. DVD recording can actually work if you leave Media Center and use some XP program which doesn’t know anything about the remote control. It will play DVDs.
Audio – Uh Oh
I already had a distributed digital music system, with PCs and laptops running iTunes, sharing libraries, which worked just fine. When a new iTunes was started, it took about 30 seconds to get its bearings, and share the 25,000+ songs on a few machines.
Media Center wanted to put all this in “My Music”, so I let it. TWO DAYS LATER it was still adding files AND THEN IT LOST THEM!!!! Since there was a terabyte on the machine and a person only needs so many reruns of The Daily Show, I moved a copy of the music up to a local drive. MCE then updated “My Music” with the new files but can’t get rid of the old ones, which it doesn’t access anyway, so there are almost 60,000 titles and HALF OF THEM ARE WRONG!!!
Not to be totally negative, you get a little dancing animated Scooby-Doo, who keeps time to the music and you can download more Windows Dancers for 20 bucks (yeah, I did it). The visualizations are certified Grateful Dead quality concert space-outs and go well with Scooby and the other dancing fools.
With FM radio on the machine, you could have an FM-Tivo to record mp3s. It would seem to make sense. Instead, the radio in MCE has a user interface last seen in a late seventies car radio. You pick 9 FM stations, by frequency. Play one, or don’t. The sound quality is marginally better than a car radio, but not by much.
One does wonder if anybody ever really tried this before the put on the shrink-wrap. Mixing consumer electronics with Windows and the Internet is just one wacky idea.
The Final Indignity
The Netopian dream of the refrigerator that orders more milk when you run low remains elusive. But in the 21st century, with Media Center, your VCR can now offer to sell you Viagra. And it has a social disease.
That is the final curse of Media Center. Even if it worked, it would still be Windows .
Have a question or comment about this article? Please post it in the official Road Kill on the Convergence Highway forum thread!
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