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.