XP Media Center

Let’s cut to the chase – Windows Media Center (at least in XP guise – I haven’t tried Vista) is, if not quite a disaster, a long way from being capable of acting as a reliable living room device. Even ignoring the product’s shortcomings (restrictions on the number of tuners it supports; poor support for digital terrestrial television in UK/Europe among them) the darned thing crashes far too often.

Being (humbly) pretty good at setting up my PCs and strict at avoiding the installation of software that causes so many reliability issues, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to give a “three-fingered salute (aka Ctrl-Alt-Del) to my PC and the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD) is almost never seen in these parts. Media Center (sic) reset all these expectations by frequently requiring the use of Task Manager to shut it down when it froze and far too frequent reboots of the entire machine.

That’s not to mention Microsoft’s habit of releasing “security updates” to the operating system itself that cause the PC to reboot all by itself – a more than annoying activity when it interrupts a film or sports program you were recording overnight.

Problems with Media Center include:

• The program is so tied to Microsoft via its Internet connection that almost any disruption to the network connection causes a crash.
• Miscellaneous and meaningless errors: eg, the program frequently refuses to record a program showing in the guide, claiming that “the guide does not contain information on this program” – even when it patently does – stopping and restarting the Media Center shell allows the recording.
• Microsoft doesn’t think people outside Seattle watch TV. Specifically, the program’s ability to tune in digital broadcasts in UK regions is at best patchy. Reading independent web sites reveals similar problems in many regions along with the registry hacks(!) necessary to allow or force the tuning software to work with local broadcasts.
• It supports at most two tuners – unless you’re prepared to hack the registry (and do so every time it downloads an update). In this multi-channel age, it’s far from uncommon to find several appealing programs broadcast across different channels in the same peak viewing slot and with DVB-T tuners available for a few measly pounds/dollars it’s hardly unreasonable to expect support for four or five.
• Playback of a recorded DVB-T program within which signal quality fell causing dropouts causes a crash necessitating a complete reboot of the machine.

I could go on (and on, and on …) but suffice to say that I have given up with Microsoft’s Media Center and replaced it with something rather better.

PVR to Media Centre

While music and photos were being streamed wirelessly to the bedroom, the good old VHS video recorder had been replaced with a hard-disk based PVR (Personal Video Recorder) – at first a Humax device that also incorporated a DVD player then a Digifusion unit.

The impact of these devices on TV watching habits can’t be overstated. The ability to “point-and-shoot” (where have we heard that phrase before? ;) ) at a program and have it reliably recorded is addictive – in fact, it’s far too easy to quickly build up a library of hundreds of hours of recorded TV that you will never have time to watch! More usefully, a 14 day program guide meant that I could easily and reliably ensure that I need rarely miss a Grand Prix just because I was away on my frequent travels.

All good and great but …. how do you get the recordings out of the box? Ok, you can buy PVR units that have a built-in DVD recorder (so sons that forgot to record the Grand Prix for themselves might be sent a copy) but any thought of watching recorded programs in another room rely on old-fashioned video distribution and those infra red remote extender gizmos. Hardly “bleeding edge” and not at all in keeping with the thinking round here.

So, just over a year ago a moment of weakness in PC World made me the new owner of a Sony VAIO XL100 Media Center PC – a reasonably smart (silver and black, almost hifi-looking) unit that runs Windows XP Media Center edition.

Media Centres

To a software/networks/gadget geek with a deep interest in music and film, the lure of having access to my music, videos, photos and a choice of independent radio anywhere in the house is just too much to resist. My CD collection has slowly been migrating to one of the servers in the garage for a couple of years now (I have a lot of CDs!) and my photography and occasional forays into video went digital years ago but finding ways to distribute these files around the house has occupied many an hour.

A couple of years ago, I bought first a Linksys WMA11B network media player (NMP) and installed its companion software on one of the PCs to act as the stream server. That never worked too well – the low (802.11b WiFi) network bandwidth restricted it to music playback only; photos took an age to appear and it had no support for video at all. Worst of all, its proprietary server software consumed far too much CPU overhead and was incompatible with other devices.

The Linksys was replaced fairly quickly with a D-Link DSM320 NMP that supports 802.11g (54Mbps) WiFi and works using open standards (UPNP) to replay music, videos, photos and streamed Internet radio stations. It also has a captive 100Mbps Ethernet connection. That worked well connected to a PC running the separate Windows Media Connector freebie (now incorporated into Windows Media Player 11). Music (including CD quality WAVs) played back fine over the WiFi connection and it was even possible to watch MPEG and DivX encoded movies – as long as you ignored the lack of lip-sync!

The Outlook is circular

Remember the start of this epic voyage of email and PIM updating started with a desire to move away from Outlook. Where has it ended up? Back with Outlook, that’s where.

A few reasons:

• Try as I might, it’s hard to escape Microsoft’s marketing muscle – in this case translated into compatibility with the portable devices I use (IPAQ and Nokia phone/PIM) and others that I might consider using in future. The sheer market weight of Outlook means that manufacturers are compelled to provide at least some level of data interchange with Outlook and, while I did discover products and add-ons to programs such as Thunderbird that aim to do the same thing, they are all affected by the problems that surround Open Source “products” (which I will get round to discussing some time soon, I promise).
• Office 2007 appeared and is a substantial step forward for Outlook. While still some way from my ideal (that I can’t find elsewhere in any case) it is better at organising tasks and calendar and, even in beta form, proved more reliable than the alternatives (Thunderbird, The Bat, Eudora, Pocomail) that I tried – several of which lost data (or would have, had I not been strict about keeping backups.