Recently, Thomas Hawk opened an interesting dialog via blog on the limitations of MCE and gets some good though defensive replies from Charlie Owen of the e-Home group at MS.
It’s all good stuff… at least it’s a healthy dialog, but continues to bring up the weakness of the platform for power users. I’d really like to see MCE (or a system from Apple) succeed in this category but it has to work for more than just simple users. Tivo (outside of DirectTV and $1000) does not support HDTV. MCE supports OTA HDTV, but can’t handle cable or sat connections at all. This is largely due to restrictions from the carriers and possibly the content owners since a PC is a more of an open system than your cable box which is a prefered system.
Beyond HD, there are some major limitations for those users with large music libraries as well. Apparently this will be fixed with Vista, but windows users have been waiting for quite a while as it is for this and there’s no reason to believe that it will be fixed for real until the day it happens. I am not sure if the limitations are simply UI (likely) but there’s got to be a way to handle this from a 10′ perspective. I don’t necessarily want to use a keyboard to queue up a playlist…
The rest of MCE I think I could tolerate. It’s the best thing from an integrated system perspective going now. Though hopefully things across many fronts will improve soon.
I’ve tried testing the large library in Vista, but the beta that I have is still too unstable. Supposedly a more stable beta is coming later this year and as soon as I can get MCE and WMP to import my large library I’ll be testing out the speed and hopefully we see an improvement. Matt Goyer from Microsoft said we would, but like you I’m waiting to see it with my own eyes before buying off on it.
I wish is was more clear how much better things were going to be… I think this leaves room for someone else to take advantage of the hardware platform which quite robust.