MCE — I’m with Stupid

I just caught this hilarious post on BYOPVR courtesy of Channel9.  This piece chronicles the adventure of a seemingly highly techncal geek setting up their own MCE box from scratch. The main way MCE gets sold is through packaged boxes which have addressed (in theory) some technical issues, but it’s still quite amazing to read of the troubles… and of the amount of work to get things configured in the HDTV world in which we live…

What Media Center does really well is show many ways there are to mess with an HDTV monitor that it doesn’t like, and allow you to practice starting in “safe mode”.

What is does really poorly is most of everything else. I retired from battle with a strategic retreat: moving the whole shebang to the bedroom, cohabitating with me, spouse, two medium dogs, and a vanilla 27” CRT.

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. [Build Your Own PVR]

I would certainly recommend the read to anyone interested in the category.  The final point pretty much sums up what I know I’ve said, experienced and certainly read from others…

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 .

While the Apple Front Row solution is similar in that it’s an application / UI running on top of an existing OS, the underlying system is easier to manage, and generally speaking free from hassle. It’s quite unlikely that you will see a Virus warning pop-up at any time while running a Mac.

The more transparent the system – from setup to playback – the better the whole HTPC category will do. While TiVO can be a challenge to setup and configure to the average consumer, HTPC devices which seek to do far more than handle “simple” DVR functions will blow the minds of most — if not the just the early adopters who crave the technology, but can’t stand the issues. This stuff is getting close, but is still not where it needs to be for a consumer technology to be accepted on a mass level. Regardless of how many boxes MS says they’ll ship in the next year courtesy of bundling…

Technorati Tags: MediaCenter, BYOPVR, Microsoft, Apple, Front Row