My Top 10 Fiji requests

So much talk about Fiji these days since Microsoft took over the Green Button (here and here and here). Most of the conversion is around H.264 and DirecTV. I think the H.264 and DirecTV horse have been beat to death.

Here is my personal top 10 list of features that I want addressed (and some of them will be):

1. Recording TV from the Buffer - This is my absolute number one. If my Time Warner DVR can do it, my Vista MC should be able to do it better. There have been a few times while I watched the news that I wish I could easily save what I just saw so that my wife could see it later. I can explain to my family the loss of On Demand channels from our old cable box but I cannot explain this one.
   
2. Higher Resolution Album Art - C'mon we live the HD era!! The Xbox guys declared this back in 2005. Jump on board and let us display the high res album art that we have been collecting.
3. Overhaul Pictures and Video - There are a number of problems here so I suggest just overhaulling everything. My biggest gripe though is the shared watch folders. I want to specify one folder for my pictures and one folder for my videos with NO cross pollination. MCE 2005 worked better in my opinion and that wasn't to great.
4. Internet TV - Let's take this bad boy out of beta and really stretch it's legs. Add proper YouTube support that works on the extenders. Partner with the major networks to get their streaming content off the website and onto my TV. A Hulu partnership would be huge. I understand they revenue stream so throw in some comercials somewhere (intercut, ads on a the side).
5. TV Favorites - This is one the will be in the Fiji update!! I used favorites all the time on my Time Warner cable box and I am happy to have the feature back in my daily viewing life.
6. Better Tuner Support - This is another one that I am excited about. There is some updates in Fiji and I look forward to getting the actual details, but hopefully this will mean that I can have my cable card channels and my HDHomerun channels use the same channel number while still assigning record and watch priority.
7. More guide sources - If you look at all the guide issues that appear on TheGreenButton and other forums one of the items that quickly stands out is that Zap2It (U.S. source for guide data) is not always the most reliable. Case in point: I set the new Showtime series "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" to record as a series and missed the first few episodes because every episode in the guide is flagged as a repeat.
8. Consistent extender experience - The biggest inconsistency is the codec support and the biggest offender is Microsoft's own Xbox 360. Give my DVR-MS/WTV, WMV, MPEG, Divx, Xvid across the board on all extenders and also give me smooth fast forward / rewind on all video files types.
9. Video resume - I should have a resume option on ALL my video not just recorded tv.
10. Super playlist - I want an easy way to make a playlist that mixes music, pictures and video. When the family comes over for Thanksgiving or Christmas it would be great to put a playlist together that consisted of family photos with music in the background and a few family videos. All the content is there and so it the functionality. I shouldn't have to crack open video editing software to make this happen. This is true media convergence and would be killer for media center to offer.
    

Storage Dilemma

I am planning on finishing my “Living With Media Center” series this week and will hopefully get around to producing my videos too.

Today I just wanted to rant about storage space and my self imposed dilemma. I have 2.2 Terabytes of storage and I am running out of space. That is soooo crazy. My space issues come from two sources: 1) I have to record everything in HD and I can’t get rid of it and 2) I love collecting movies again!!

So my first dilemma is almost a direct result of the space that I now have and the hectic schedule my family has been on. It has become harder and harder to sit down together with my wife to watch shows these days. Luckily we have the storage space that allows us to do mini-marathons of shows (4-6 episodes). The problem is we are not doing it. We are starting to get back on track finally so this should ease up a bit. With the fall season quickly approaching though, we need to get a better schedule or more storage space.

The second dilemma is my new increased addiction to collecting movies. I have been adding more and more of my DVD’s onto the hard drive as of late. This may be a side effect of not watching my recorded TV with my wife because now I turn to the movies in our movie collection. It also doesn’t help that Circuit City and Best Buy advertise $5 DVD’s every Sunday. $5!!! It’s not HD, but for most movies 480p will be fine by me. Of course more storage would help here too.

It seems like the answer is more storage! I want to buy one more 1 TB drive. After that I will need to get a Drobo or Windows Home Server. I am cleaning up my current drives and here is what the new breakdown will look like:

• 500GB Main Drive (240 GB available):
  • Music – 65 GB
  • Photos – 15 GB
  • Videos – 2 GB (misc videos)
  • Music Videos – 16 GB
• 750GB Drive:
  • Recorded TV – Main space for recorded TV
  • TV Archive – 200 GB (Shows I want to keep. Display with myTV plugin)
• 1 TB Drive:
  • Movies – 720 GB

So if anyone actually reads this blog and has a media center, post a comment and let me know how much storage you have and how it’s broken down.