Is this accurate from Paul's review?

"Today's Media Center Extender devices are standard definition (SD) only, and don't natively support HDTV. (That said, you can indeed display HD content through an Extender, though it will be down-sampled to SD)."

That would mean that current extenders will now display HD content in SD with rollup 2. I'm not seeing it - I get the windows that says the extender doesn't support digital tv content.

"Paul --> '...you can still only record two shows at a time, even with four tuner cards installed."

Paul should have listened to my show with Matt he explained well the TV card functions

How about playing Windows Media Audio Pro 5.1 multichannel 96/24 audio, with DRM, through the XBox 360? I understand it decodes DolbyDigital 5.1, etc., but what will the implementation of WMA be at launch, thereafter?

unfortunately, it seems that your last sentence sums up my entire review of this overhyped rollup: "...end users should never even know this feature is there at all."

After installing on 2 MCEs here, we came to the conclusion that a new zoom mode, an optimization feature that does *something* at 4:00am, and some features that aren't available to us are all that were added. If there was some documentation (a readme would be fine) that listed the actual features and why they are or aren't available (or visible) would be so nice.

Instead, we have a zoom mode, some features that we, as users, should never know about (DVD burning improvements, bug fixes, etc), and some features that MCE buyers will enjoy on their new machines next year that may or may not be somewhere hidden on our machines.

I am sure that you'll be able to add XBox 360 integration to our list in a couple months, but that's not really something I care about at all, the xbox stays in my roomy's bedroom, I never even see it. The living room games are PC games sent to the 120" projector. :)

The "optimization" is simply a restart of ehshell.exe?

I don't have Media Center personally, but I know it's largely written in managed code. Makes me wonder if this restart is necessitated by poor garbage collection or some other consequence of being written in .NET.

You know, with every release I keep hoping a few things that are IMO sub-optimal with the music interface will be fixed, but they're not. My biggest problems:

1. When sorting by Genre, the next sort level is album. Why? Every other music cataloguer sorts by Genre->ARTIST->Album. Does anyone really want to see a list of album titles rather than artists when drilling down into a genre?

2. When sorting by Artist, if some tracks for that artist aren't assigned, they show up under "Unknown" for album. But when going to "Unknown," you get EVERY artist's tracks where the album is unknown rather than those of the single artist you originally went to.

3. The initial sort in the music section is by Album. I know that's because it's alphabetically before Artist, but again, no one with a decent-sized music collection wants a huge list of albums initially. The default really should be Artist or Genre (or at least there should be a way to change it, or MCE should remember your last sort level).

4. I know that "Album Artist" is used by MCE because of compilations. This is to me a classic example of hard cases making bad law - 95% of music browsing would be better served by always using the simple "Artist" tag, since (a) the field MCE calls "Album Artist" other software calls something else and (b) most tagging software doesn't fill in either of those fields automatically when ripping.

I've sent in feature requests before, and seen others discuss these issues, but I've never seen reasons as to why Microsoft made the choices they did rather than sticking with the interface established by nearly all other music catalogs, and the iPod interface in particular. In fact, I haven't noticed any real music UI improvements since the first version of MCE. I just don't get it - these are pretty simple things, why not consider changes that would make it better?

Sorry for the rant - just found the blog and figured I'd vent. For those of us with many thousands of mp3s, seemingly little issues like this can make it a real pain to find the music we want to listen to. I really like my MCE, but wish the music interface UI made things easier.