Charlie Owen - Have Questions About Windows Media Center or Team...?

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Have Questions About Windows Media Center or Team...?

I promised Ian Dixon a few days ago I would start a new series of posts here at Retrosight for end users of Windows Media Center and since the MVPs are in town getting ready to ask quite a lot of questions I thought I would kick things off a little earlier than he expects. I'm going call these posts 'Mailbag' (modeled after Aaron) and they will be totally community driven.

So...

Leave your question as a comment for this post -- I'll answer one per comment in the order in which they are posted. If you leave more than one question per comment, I'll answer your first one and ignore the rest to give everyone a chance to ask. I'll shoot for one per week, but may be more or less depending on my bandwidth and how involved the questions or answers become.

Update: I just answered the first, and had to gently wordsmith the question a little bit to post in the title. If you post a question and I wordsmith to make things clearer, and you think I changed the question in the process, post a comment on my answer post (not here) and I'll try to clarify.

[You can see this coming...] There will inevitably be some questions I probably won't be able to answer with as much detail as you wish (like 'Can you list out the entire feature set for the next version?') -- but I will make every effort to give you a meaningful answer.

What do you want to know about the Windows Media Center product or team?

Categories: Mailbag | Comments [34] |

| Posted on Wednesday, March 14, 2007 4:17:50 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 5:15:16 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I must say that Media Center wasn't the huge leap forward I was hoping for, and in some cases it even took steps backwards. For example, in MCE 2005 one of the most talked about new feature by its developers is totally missing: being able to search for future movies (not in the 2 week guide) by actor or director name. Now you can't do this in vista, (at least in a direct way).

My question is will: we have to wait for new features when the next version of Windows comes out, which IMHO would provide competitors like Apple a chance to catch up? Or can we expect new and/or improved features sooner than that: i.e. by service pack 1?

Jaxim

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 6:22:29 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Can you clarify the relationship between Home Server and MCE?

Will we see a frontend/backend setup? Tuner support for Home Server?

Shawn

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 7:39:04 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

When/where can we buy a CableCARD-equipped Media Center PC? I've waited years for CableCARD, faithfully standing by Media Center and dutifully waiting for Vista to ship. Now that it's shipped, I still can't find a CableCARD-equipped PC. I'm still using Media Center 2005 because I refuse to upgrade to Vista and then pay again to upgrade to Vista + CableCARD.

Brad C.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 8:07:22 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Are you working on solving the album art problem reported by many users (including Ian Dixon) here http://thedigitallifestyle.com/cs/forums/2344/ShowThread.aspx#2344

There are also posts about it on The Green Button...

Or is this "by design"? I mean, I can understand my album art is resized to 75 x 75 pixel for the view of all my albums (performance) - but why can't MCE just use the embedded album art when playing a song and showing "the big" album art. Loading e.g. a 500 x 500 pixel image can’t really hurt performance here or am I missing something here?

Kenneth

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 8:48:55 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I would like to watch satellite tv (DVB-S, Astra 19°, Middle Europe, Germany) with the vista media center edition.

As far as i know, MCE only supports DVB-T. So i'm planning to use the "Universal DVB Receiver" tool, which maps DVB-S frequencies to DVB-T.

Which tv-cards are supported to watch DVB-S or DVB-S2 with the media center ui under windows vista?

/Mischa

Mischa

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 11:39:40 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

There are some visual elements of Media Center that are very hard to read from 10 feet away unless you have perfect vision. For example, the clock at the welcome screen is very small. It could be bigger without it interfering with any other visual elements around it. Or some of the programming text descriptions can be awfully hard to read.

For the next version of Media Center, will you make it so you don't necessarily need glasses or perfect vision to see most of the visual elements? For example, will you create a setting feature which would allow a user to modify a "style sheet" so they can either permanently or temporarily adjust the size of different elements? Or will you make all visual elements by default easier to read from 10 feet away?

Jack

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 12:21:26 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I have 3 questions:

When will support for sessioncookies in web based MCML be available?

Stand-by mode (S3) in Vista works great for me, except that there are so many scheduled tasks that keep my MCE alive. It looks like it never sleeps. MCE 2005 didn't have this problem. What steps should I take to reduce this problem.

My Dvd seems slow when adding a lot of network dvd's. Every time a page is requested it looks like all dvd's on all network drives are researched. Is / will it be possible to use some kind of caching?

Raymond

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 3:28:52 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I have two simple questions for you Charlie:

1. Why is there no way to tell which Recorded TV shows I've watched? I recorded an entire season of a show and have no way of telling which one I've watched. See this post for some suggestions: http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/174362.aspx

2. Why is there no way to use the mouse to quickly seek to a specific time location in a recording? I tried to use the mouse to click on the timeline but that did not work.
See this post for some additional info: http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/post/173127.aspx

Brian

Thursday, March 15, 2007 1:01:41 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

In Vista I really like the ability to use Windows Photo Gallery to tag pictures and then view photos by a tag within Media Center. I would love to be able to view multiple tags at the same time. For example, if the grandparents are over and I want to display a slideshow that contains any pictures tagged with grandmother or grandfather that also is tagged with my son.

In MCE 2005 you specified directories for different sections (Music, Videos, and Pictures) but in Vista the Library Setup applies to all sections. I find this useful with one exception. How can I setup Media Center so that my album art doesn't appear in My Pictures?

Mark

Thursday, March 15, 2007 2:21:31 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Any plans yet to fix the well-known problem with the excessive overscan on XBOX 360 extenders when using the component output which has existed in all versions of MC since at least 2005?

Michael Luloh

Thursday, March 15, 2007 7:33:53 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Aaron Stebner pointed me to this site in today's MC Expert Zone Chat. I appreciated his participation and responses.

I also appreciate Jessica Zahn's participation at The Green Button.

My question is: What, if anything, is keeping Microsoft from formally supporting H.264 in MCE and Pika?

PS I would love to hear news about v.2 MCX ("Pika") boxes. I'd be happy to see Softsled released, even as part of a commercial MCE Plus! product.

KinchE

Thursday, March 15, 2007 9:45:01 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Charlie, does the Media Center team consider developing new PVR capabilities or PVR enabling technologies a top priority? What areas do you think remains to be done or improved upon there?

JohnCz

Friday, March 16, 2007 10:30:29 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I have a question ive wanted to ask the MCE team for a little while. I read about a year ago a comment from you on another website where you mentioned that the MCE team had never really intended for an MCE computer to be functioning in its MCE aspect while simultaneously being used as a home computer (as in TV on one screen, normal computer function on another.) This is why some functionality is a little... shaky. But still essentially complete, i might add.

Anyway, my question is: as computers are moving increasingly towards parallel processing with 4 and even 8 core designs on the near horizon, are there any plans for increasing support for parallel computing in MCE?

To me, MCE really feels like the perfect application of multi core technology. A core or cores to handle MCE functions (decoding/encoding, menu functions, etc), and a core or cores to drive the normal computer functions. Essentially, what i picture as the long term evolutionary direction of MCE and the PC is to a central highly powered computer in the living room handling many tasks simultaneously, instead of a single computer for each task. One computer handling the TV, while simultaneously powering another user playing a video game, while also handling other household functions.

Anyway, im more than happy to talk about this further at the address listed.

-Brett

Brett M.

Friday, March 16, 2007 12:12:35 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Hi from a french MVP !
(sorry for my bad english)

I'm actually running Vista Ultimate Fr and connected an XBOX360 (wired). While MCE is a great product, some behavior are really a pain :

1) Please, please, please, allow to quickly seek to a specific time location using mouse or xbox360 stuff, just by moving the time line cursor. (it's a requested feature since first beta !)

2) Why the recorded shows makes big squares and sometimes flickering (stops half a second then restarts or rewind 5 secondes) on my xbox360 at start or forward/rev. ? (only DVR-MS stuff ! not with transcoded video using Transcode360 !!!)

3) Why i can't select videos by folder ?

It's the 3 problems you can resolve to make me happy ! ;-)

And if you can stream an AVI/DVD from Ultimate to XBOX360, it can become nearly perfect...

Cheers

Jean-Marc

Friday, March 16, 2007 3:22:18 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Hi there,
Been a user of MCE for a long time now and have 2 MCE boxes. I'm also part of the Windows Home Server Beta, but the hardware I have on hand probably isn't good enough, so I may search for a cheap low-end server to do my bidding... that is, if Home Server will be available to install on my box at release (not just an appliance).

My real question is:
Is Media Center going to have Orb or Slingbox-like capabilities built into it for remote viewing or access?

Ideally, I'd like to be able to log into an ASPX page, select things I want to convert down to Zune or PSP, and then download them overnight from my hotel room to watch on the plane.

I do this today (though not well on Vista) via Hamachi, VNC, and conversion tools.
Thanks,
TTFN
gregger

gregger

Friday, March 16, 2007 6:01:53 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

1. What is the best way to record Cable TV without a CableCard and on a home built system. Is there an IR blaster that is recommended by MS?

2. Do you compare response times of Remote Control commands to Tivo? I am referring both to response times over a 360 extender and at the actual Vista machine. They are much slower and feel cumbersome.

Jon Heupel

Friday, March 16, 2007 8:09:14 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I am having a problem. Go figure :) I am using windows vista home premium. under my windows media player all my album art is correct; correct picture for each album under each artist. But when i goto windows media center some artist that have multiple albums have the same album cover for each different album. I have tried multple things like delete the mp3 and re-ripping it, re-tagging it. nothing works. any ideas or do i need to wait for microsoft to send out an update to fix it?

Jeremy Stewart

Saturday, March 17, 2007 11:57:30 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Hi Charlie,

Thank you for answering our questions. You recently answered a question about the CableCard integration. I have DirectTV. Can you shed some light on how DirectTV will integrate into my existing Vista MediaCenter?

1. Will I be able to record HD directly to my PC with DirectTV?

2. Do I Will the HD content be able to stream to my Xbox 360 extenders? (Are there any HDCP issues that I need to be concerned about?)

3. I have a very robust MediaCenter (dual 3.6GHz Xeons and 2 MB RAM). Am I going to be able to add this functionality to my existing machine or will I be forced to buy a pre-configured computer?

4. Finally, can you give me a *very* rough timeframe on when we can expect a DirectTV solution? This year? Next year?

Thanks!

Mark Little

Sunday, March 18, 2007 8:16:34 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Hi Charlie. When will I be able to easily add HD-DVD playback support to my Vista based MCE PC? Whatever happened to HD-DVD managed copy support? My new Vista MCE has all the right hardware specs to support HD-DVD movie playback, but I can't seem to find any software products which allow me to actually make that possible through the MCE interface. I also am really looking forward to legal "managed" copies of my HD-DVDs on my Windows Home Server box, but I wasn't able to get a straight answer on this at CES.

Jimmy Grewal

Sunday, March 18, 2007 1:47:20 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Sorry about the grammar in my posting above. Question number two should read:

2. Will I be able to stream HD content from the Vista MediaCenter to my Xbox 360 extenders? (Are there any HDCP issues that I need to be concerned about?)

Mark Little

Monday, March 19, 2007 6:40:45 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Hi Charlie, thanks for taking the time to answer some of our many questions.

Are there any plans to implement some kind of read-only mode in Media Center? I've had some unfortunate incidents were guests have deleted files from my library by accident when the user is prompted with options after playback. I would love to have a way to disable the 'delete' option and also the option to be brought back to the library instead of the play/delete/done menu after video playback. Thanks.

Magnus

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 12:49:28 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Mark Little good questions. I was wondering the same thing....

Mark

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 7:49:20 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Why doesn't Microsoft market Media Center more aggresively?

Apple TV is getting all this press, but it doesn't compare against Media Center. Microsoft really needs to talk up Media Center and get the word out. It has been lost somewhere within the Vista marketing. It should definitely be marketed by itself instead of a feature of Vista. Why should Apple have a corner market on all the cool commercials?

If you advertise Media Center and its extenders (including XBOX), you'll sell more copies of Vista.

Jaxim

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 7:59:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I'd like to point out the comments/questions I totally agree with:

- be able to "seek to a specific location using mouse..."
- be able to see Media Center on one monitor(TV) and work on computer on another
- be able to tag and view multiple tags thru MCE
- not see album art under photos category

I'd also like to point the following thread over on theGreenButton.com which describes what's currently missing in Vista:
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/177589.aspx

Jaxim

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 7:08:33 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Why can't MCE discretely access zoom modes for HD?

Ben

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 7:09:54 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Is there a way to set up a preference for HD versions of shows over non-HD versions? This would seem a great example of intelligence in MCE.

Ben

Friday, March 23, 2007 12:21:35 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Can you store TV recorded with a CableCard on a NAS or USB drive?

Kevin

Friday, March 30, 2007 3:59:07 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Hi Charlie

I'm really looking forward to extenders for Windows Vista. When will we see more extenders besides XBox 360?

Regards,
Thomas Ardal

Thomas Ardal

Friday, April 06, 2007 6:31:30 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I am co developer of the Transcode 360 project, I have been desparetly trying to get an answer for this question from the Media Center team/Microsoft without getting anywhere.

Our utility requires Media Center to accept a live MPEG2 stream on the Xbox 360 that is been transcoded on the fly by Media Center, why does Media Center skip through the MPEG2 stream i.e. if there is 2 minutes of available video in the stream at the time the playback starts it will play for 2 minutes and once it gets to 2 minutes it now has more media but instead of just continuing it will skip about 15-30 seconds ahead of the 2 minutes and carry on playing the film because it realises that there is more than the 2 minutes of footage available, it will continue to do this every time it gets to the point the media center had transcoded to when it last skipped which is extremely annoying.

This was never an issue in Media Center 2005 it just worked without skipping, we thought it was at first Microsofts new MPEG2 decoder that is built in to Vista but we have tried replacing it with NVidia which worked fine in 2005 and it has the same issue as above.

We desperately need to know how to resolve this issue as the 2005 version of this product has 250,000 users who at present I can only advise not to upgrade to Windows Vista Media Center.

A response would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

James

James Botham

Monday, April 09, 2007 12:50:54 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

How about adding FLAC support?

Bernie

Thursday, April 12, 2007 12:04:07 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

:What do you want to know about the Windows Media Center product or team?

Answering the questions that have been posted already, perhaps?

Fred Rubin

Monday, April 16, 2007 6:39:22 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Charlie,

I've been wondering something. After I record a tv show of 15 minutes, what type of file does it become? .avi? .mov? .wmv? Because I want to convert some videos to save space in my computer.

Raúl

Tuesday, April 24, 2007 3:24:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Hi - just bought a new Dell XPS 210 with dual core 2.66 ghz, 4 gig RAM and 500 gig SATA drive, Vista Ultimate - I have been a long time user of MCE2005 and it worked flawlessly from the extender to my Xbox 360 - now the video skips and stops and sometimes the thing disconnects - I am not trying to do HD jsut regular television.

Also had a really embarassing moment at a party recently doing a photo slideshow and playing music - why oh WHY can we not pick the folders like before! I wont go into details but suffice it to say that some pics that I didnt want in the slideshow came up as apparently Vista MC was pulling all jpg photos from my PC - still looking into how to resolve this short of just moving stuff off.

Thanks!

John

Thursday, May 10, 2007 11:03:52 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Hi, I have been having a problem with Windows Media Center and my Xbox 360. I have a very large library of videos on my Media Center PC which I like to stream to my 360. Problem is, navigating to the video I want to watch can take forever because of the lag in displaying thumbnails for the videos. I really could care less about having a thumbnail there. I have my videos labeled and I know what they are. I just wish I could navigate to them quickly instead of it taking me 15 to 20 minutes to navigate to the video I want because the lag is so bad. Please let me know if there is some sort of registry or any other kind of tweak to address this.

Thanks

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