Thanks to Kevin over at FloppyHead.com for the link to one of my Cable Card posts. I hope it was helpful to those that linked through to read it.
I also had a link over from Brent Evans over at GeekTonic.
Now I just need to finish my Living With Media Center series!!
I know a lot of people have complained about the music functionality in Media Center, but I really like it.
It has a really cool slick UI. You can sort you music by a few canned sort options such as Year, Genre, Artist, Album. You can see all of the album art in a small icon or large icon in almost all of these views. Looks very slick. Overall I am satisfied.
One of the biggest complaints in Media Center’s music implementation is the album art. If you have taken the time to make sure you have nice high resolution album art prepare to be slightly disappointed. Media Center does not show the album art directly from the MP3 tag. It actually pulls a copy of the album art out of the MP3 file and places it in the folder in a 200x200 resolution version. On a small TV, no problem. On a 52” HDTV not so hot. I personally have a 42” HD set and at the end of the day it does not bother me too much. It’s not horrible, but it could be better.
Media Center – Music Experience Video
Another thing to be aware of is that Media Center relies 100% on tag metadata. You do not have an option to traverse your music through a folder structure. Because of this I highly recommend that you have your tag metadata in order before you add your music to Media Center. I actually put my music in a TEMP folder first, fix/update the metadata with MediaMonkey and then move the files to a subfolder of my main music folder. This has kept my music in a nice organized condition.
My family’s everyday use with music has been positive. I have a few playlists ready to go and it is super easy to build a playlist on the fly. You can search for music using the number keys on the remote control or by typing on the keyboard if you are at the PC. It has been great during parties with friends and nice to have music coming through my main sound system without having to hook-up the iPod.
One of the best ways I have found to make playlists though is with Windows Media Player or MediaMonkey. Just save or export the playlist to a subfolder in your Music folder that Media Center watches.
We do not use Music as much as the TV/Movies functionality but when we do it works well for us and overall we really have no complaints.
The main driver in moving my family to a Media Center system was for the perceived advantages over the DVR supplied by Time Warner Cable (our cable provider) or over buying a Tivo.
The advantages I expected to deliver to my family were
So far I would say that we have definitely realized these advantages, but have discovered a disadvantage or two along the way.
The hard drive space that we have is shared with all the content, not just recorded TV. So for the most part we can record TV without thinking about space or without deleting other content first. I currently have 12 HD movies recorded, 10 episodes of the Daily Show, 10 episodes of the Colbert Report, 4 episodes of House (HD), 5 episodes of Hell’s Kitchen (HD), 6 episodes of Desperate Housewives (HD) and other shows in HD and standard def. This does not even account for shows that I have archived with the myTV plugin. There is no way my Time Warner cable box can compete. They are just now allowing an external hard drive to help with the storage situation.
My Old Time Warner Experience Video
The series recording and series management has some great convenience features. One unexpected convenience is the default series recording settings. For 99% of you recordings you usually want to record only new episodes only. Now this can be the default for all series (along with other settings). Next time you set a series to record you do not have to deal with the series recording options.
Another quick convenience is setting a series to record from the guide. If you see a show you want to record on the guide just highlight and press the record button. This will record the one episode. If you want to record the series just press the record button twice and the series is set using the default settings. Quick and easy!!
The most used convenience is the record once, watch anywhere. I can now watch any TV that I record in the office on the Media Center PC, in the Master Bedroom with and extender or in the living room with the Xbox 360 extender. Long gone are the days of wanting to relax in bed and watch some recorded TV but not being able to (unless I had 2 DVR’s and recorded the show twice). Once you have this option you will never want to go back.
Media Center – TV Experience Video
UPDATE: Ok so all of that is great but what are the disadvantages? The disadvantages we have seen are live buffer recording and Cable Card.
There have been a few times in which I was watching something (usually the news) and then wanted to record it for my wife to see when she got home. This worked great on the cable box since it would record everything that you had in the buffer for that show. The media center does not do that. It starts from the point you press record. This has burned us a few times.
The second disadvantage in the new system is the Cable Card stability. Both of my ATI Digital Cable Tuners work great without the cards and the cable signal has been tested and is very strong even after I attach the splitter. One of my tuners works perfect with cable card 100% of the time. The other tuner sometimes loses signal on specific channels.
For example, we record The Daily Show every day. Comedy Central, channel 52, unfortunately is one of the channels that the Cable Card loses signal on. To fix that I need to tune to another channel close by (53 or 54) and then tune back to Comedy Central. After that it works and it works the Daily Show and the Colbert Report right after it.
Luckily with the Daily Show if I am not alerted in time to manually fix it at 11pm the Media Center will automatically reschedule to record it at 1am. If it was not a show that was repeated, I would have just missed it.
To help alleviate this situation as much as possible I have gone into the registry and reordered my tuner preferences so that the tuner that works 100% of the time is the primary recording tuner and the other tuner is the primary viewing tuner. It helps but has not fixed the issue.
So the advantages severely outweigh the disadvantages and I could not imagine going back to a regular cable DVR.
Next post: Music
I just downloaded Windows Live Writer and I’m taking it for a spin.
I am behind on my Living With Media Center posts but I hope to pick those back up today and complete them by this week. I have had a number of things just get in the way (rest and relaxation being one of them).
UPDATE: Testing updating existing posts. Seems to only work for posts that I generated from Live Writer. Bummer.
UPDATE 2: Thanks to Joe Cheng from Microsoft for leaving a comment and letting me know how to update previous blog post. I am definitely a Live Writer fan so far!!
