As I agree with most of the stuff here is wants for Media Center but, in my case...Jess, come on, you already know...

My wife asked me about this 2 weeks ago. She wants movie channels, and more programming. I tell her, we could get 2 cable boxes (so we can watch one wile recording another), and our monthy payment for calbe goes up about $45-55 a month (digital cable + rental of 2 boxes), or I can spend $2500-35000 on a new PC to get  cable card support. She does not like those options, she asked if we could get rid of the media center and just rent a cable box. I don't like that option.

Come on !!!! DIY cable cards or DIY Directv ASAP !!! I want to make my wife happy and keep my Media Center !!!!!!!!

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-Dave

MCP, MCSA, MCSE 2003
Windows Vista Connected Exp:Home Theater for Technologists
Windows Vista Connected Exp:Home Theater for Sales professionals

Home theater specialist (10+ years)

My wife loves media center, but ...

• Extenders are too expensive.  She wanted to get me one for Christmas, but when she found out they were $300+, she said I could kiss that dream goodbye
• Customize the tiles AND the ability to get rid of all these random folders showing up in pictures and videos.  My daughter loves to watch family videos, but it takes 5-10 clicks to get there.  And why she has to navigate past an icon for the c: drive and even the printer storage drive that doesn't even have a usb stick in it I can't figure out.  Seriously, the printer makes a big whirring noise every time she opens up the video folder.  Fiddling with "Watched Folders" doesn't help.
• Fast-forward and re-wind are way too slow for anything that is not dvr-ms.  We've got a lot of videos in WMV and it's faster to skip 30 seconds ahead then to fast-forward at full speed.
• Also, the ability to resume a video (like a WMV video) like you can with dvr-ms files. We have some old VHS movies digitized into .wmv and if you stop it, come back later you have to start from the beginning.  But you can't fast-forward fast enough to get there, so you just give up and watch something else.
• She loves how videos are tiled right next to each other, and enlarge when you navigate over them.  Very easy to fit a lot videos on the screen, and it really looks cool too.  She wishes Recorded TV could have an option to look similar to this.
• She also hates having to constantly adjust the zoom.   She doesn't like black bars on the side, and we have a mixture of 4:3 and 16:9 content.  It takes like 5-10 clicks to zoom out when she watches something 16:9, and another 5-10 clicks to zoom back in so 4::3 videos fill the screen.   Some adjustable auto-zoom settings would slow down her carpal-tunnel.
• Also, sometimes she just wants to know the time in certain places.  While look at the guide or at the main interface you can see it, but it seems like everywhere else (even in recorded TV), it's not there.
• Lastly, she wishes new channels wouldn't be listed in the guide automatically.  It's frustrating to go through DirectTV's 350 channel lineup and get it filtered down to just the channels you want.  But then a week later, 20 new paper view channels show up randomly.  Or you'll find a new info or adult or some random channel sneak in there.  It seems like every week you have to go back through the whole list and filter out stuff.

That's all I can think of right now.  Some of these are small, some are very annoying.

As mentioned earlier.. to all those wanting a better remote control.
Spend the money and time and get a good universal remote and program it correctly.
I have a Universal Remote MX-900 and it set me about about $350 including the RF receiver (no more pointing) and it controls everything.  It's simple enough my 3 year old and 5 year old can use it.  I also have a Harmony, but didn't like the setup wizard so it sits in a drawer somewhere.

My wife wants to watch DIVX movies without transcoding.. The new extenders will be able to do that, but that means about $300 for the extender.. and additional $150 or so for a new Dual Tuner card (I currently have 2 and the eVGA NVTV doesn't work in Vista

What I do for movies that get watched freuqently is to save the transcoded 360 file to mpg and move it to the correct location.  This helps a bit, but I lose the size savings of DIVX.

As for stability.  I don't use Vista yet so that helps
I also keep the main machine in the basement and use the extender for watching TV so I don;t have to deal with video drivers which seem to be the biggest staiblity issue.

Will Vista and an Extender work the same way without the lack of a Video card with TV out on the main box?

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Vista Ultimate with TV Pack
Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.2GHz (OC'd to 2.9) / 4 Gigs Ram
c: 80 Gig d: 500 Gig SATA
Tuners: PVR-500 / HDHomeRun x 2 / WinTV 1600
Extenders: DMA-2200 / DMA-2100 x 2

Linksys V1 extender (for sale..anyone interested?)

My wife wants me to stop trying marry the TV with the pc, too late for that. other than that she said that if media center did not have vista attached to it it would be great. I guess what she is saying is more like an appliance and less like a PC. by the way, she really hated it when I had mce 2005.

I love the thing, truely I think I would marry the darn thing.

My wife has been perfectly happy with the both the XP and recent upgrade to Vista, Media Centers.  The only complaint she has about VMC is also a small gripe of mine...we both dislike the new layout for the video library.  I have over 700 movies in my library and I preferred to see at least a partial title instead of only wall of borderless thumbnails.  Especially since over half of them are .mp4 with h264 video which just gives a black thumbnail (nope, sorry...not going to create a jpg for 400+ movies).

I use the MyMovies plugin, but she doesn't care much for it.  Plus, there are a lot of videos that I haven't input into MyMovies, such as TV episodes and some documentaries.  I'd put them in, but they typically have a short retention period, so it's pointless considering the time required to enter the data.

I realize that the intent was to save real estate, but it's not really something that we want to be forced to get used to.  We won't get used to it...we'll just use it.

So, I guess I'll have to say my wife (and I) want more viewing/layout options.

---

theHTPC.net

Surge I have two NVTV cards as well, and I got them to work just fine, now the quality of these cards were not that great to begin with, but they are working.

surge:

As mentioned earlier.. to all those wanting a better remote control.
Spend the money and time and get a good universal remote and program it correctly.
I have a Universal Remote MX-900 and it set me about about $350 including the RF receiver (no more pointing) and it controls everything.  It's simple enough my 3 year old and 5 year old can use it.  I also have a Harmony, but didn't like the setup wizard so it sits in a drawer somewhere.

Sorry. My wife wants a simple remote that won't const us half of what we paid for our VMC system and that you don't have to spend 10 hours to program. Actualy, more then $50 for a remote is too much considering my 2 year old destroys remotes almost a often as he destroys DVDs.

1. Make the Closed Captions easier to turn on and off. (We're both aging boomers who spent too much time in rock concerts and have trouble hearing at times). Right now there must be 10 clicks of the remote. I know there is a hotkey to turn it on and off, but everytime you adjust the volume or pause the show, it resets to the default.
2. Make it play nicely with DirecTV HD. And I don't mean make me go out and buy a new computer - I just bought a new one in August.
3. Let MC play on one monitor or TV screen without capturing the mouse, so someone can still use the computer on another monitor.

Is that too much to ask? Otherwise, we're both happy campers.

-Dan

djaru:

Surge I have two NVTV cards as well, and I got them to work just fine, now the quality of these cards were not that great to begin with, but they are working.

I'm guessing you have 2 single tuner cards.. (I hope I'm guessing wrong)

The NVTV single tuner cards work fine, but I have a Hauppauge Dual and an NVTV Dual (2 cards.. 4 tuners total)

I haven't heard of any reports of the NVTV Duals working under Vista.

---

Vista Ultimate with TV Pack
Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.2GHz (OC'd to 2.9) / 4 Gigs Ram
c: 80 Gig d: 500 Gig SATA
Tuners: PVR-500 / HDHomeRun x 2 / WinTV 1600
Extenders: DMA-2200 / DMA-2100 x 2

Linksys V1 extender (for sale..anyone interested?)

al74:

surge:

As mentioned earlier.. to all those wanting a better remote control.
Spend the money and time and get a good universal remote and program it correctly.
I have a Universal Remote MX-900 and it set me about about $350 including the RF receiver (no more pointing) and it controls everything.  It's simple enough my 3 year old and 5 year old can use it.  I also have a Harmony, but didn't like the setup wizard so it sits in a drawer somewhere.

Sorry. My wife wants a simple remote that won't const us half of what we paid for our VMC system and that you don't have to spend 10 hours to program. Actualy, more then $50 for a remote is too much considering my 2 year old destroys remotes almost a often as he destroys DVDs.

I agree it is expensive, but I needed something powerful since I have a bunch of equipment.. TV, Stereo, DVD, Extender, TiVo, X10 Lights, etc..
It's also nice to not have to worry about line of sight.

The Harmony remote I mentioned that I used once and tossed in a drawer is the Harmony 680.  It wasn't as much but I hated the wizard.  One day I'll get around to selling it.

---

Vista Ultimate with TV Pack
Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.2GHz (OC'd to 2.9) / 4 Gigs Ram
c: 80 Gig d: 500 Gig SATA
Tuners: PVR-500 / HDHomeRun x 2 / WinTV 1600
Extenders: DMA-2200 / DMA-2100 x 2

Linksys V1 extender (for sale..anyone interested?)

To others that I forgot that others mentioned above:

1. Parental controls in Canada.
   
   
2. Automatic zoom control (zoom #4 for 4:3 content and zoom #1 for all widescreen content).  A good option might be if the zoom selected would stick for 4:3 content and a potentially different zoom selected would stick for widescreen content.

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STB w/R5000HD USB I/O, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4, Quad Q6600, 4.0 GB RAM, ATI HD 3870 512MB, Ultra XVS 600W PSU, 3x SATA 500GB, 2x SATA 300GB, LG GGC-H20L, PVR-250, Toshiba 51H83 (51" HDTV), Yamaha RX-V2400 Amp, 5x Energy Speakers, SVS Sub, Harmony 880 Remote

Hi Jessica,

I have a request that has only to do with my being uneducated and unwashed. 

I would like sound focus; that is, I want the current top level window to have control of the sound.  If I have an MC window in the background and a flash window in the foreground I want to hear the sound from the flash and not the sound from the MC window (what if I have two or three different channels tuned on separate tuners and I only want to hear the one in the foreground - the cacophony from the background makes the inteface unusable).

I understand this has certain challenges (what if a background window needs to send an alert sound) that could present unexpected API changes, but associating sound focus with active window has a UI appeal that would make Windows/Vista more useable for me.

 

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If I was any more jaded, the Chinese would collect me.

My wife actually uses Media Center more than I do. Here's her recommendations.

1. I wish it would give the total number of hours recorded.

2. Faster linkup between Xbox 360 and Vista Media Center. It seems like it takes longer and longer to make the connection.

3.  The TV shows always seem to start and stop at different times than whats listed in the guide by a minute or two.

My wife wants to kill me because....

Whenever I try to watch a streamed movie with the 360 through mediacenter I get a network congestion bar at the top no matter what I do.

she wants me to archive all our DVDs so we can stream them to the 360 I say its not that simple. If I encode them into WMV we loose 5.1 AC3, if I encode them into .MPG I get the network congestion and have only a 30 second skip.

I said but wait, they are coming out with V2 which we would have to buy that will supposidly do what we want and we might need to get Vista too.

I work at a Best Buy as Geek Squad and on the sales floor and recently I've had a lot of people wondering about Media Center but simply didn't know very much about it or knew what was involved. I think there needs to be a way to get the information out to the average consumer because the desire for this product is definitly there, it's just that they only have a vague idea of what it is and how to make it all work.

So from what I gather this is what they want:

- Perhaps in the 360 there could be a video showing what is possible but explain it with great detail.

- CableCards need to become available for everyone who has Media Center already, people don't want to buy a new computer just so they can watch tv. They also want to be educated about CableCard because it's simply confusing and most people don't even know they've got the option.

- Ability to change the language on the 360 extender, my grandparents use a 360 as an extender and they would be much more comfortable if the menu was in japanese.

- Quicker channel changing.
- A quieter Xbox, although the latest hardware revisions helped a lot it's still really loud..

- Make a better remote, it feels like the 360's remote had channel numbers stuck on thier as an after-thought and simply feels awkward to press the numbers.

- Bundle the Media Center remote with the 360! And perhaps include a brochure inside explaining Media Center coupled with the remote.

- Support to record files to an NAS and/or move files to another location after x amount of days for archiving and to save space locally.

- DVD library access on 360, seriously people don't want to have all thier DVD's (including HD media) lying around anymore. Think flat-panel TV, people want the space in thier living room back! So create some sort of archiving tool with crazy DRM if you want, people honestly do want this and they won't care if there is DRM to make the movies execs happy because they'll just be watching it on thier extenders at home anyway!

- Allow the Zune to sync recorded DRM-ed TV shows in SD & HD, people want thier media on the go and they'll give up thier iPod to do it.

- One of the biggest set backs is the fact that you need 1 tuner per channel, people don't want to buy several tuners they want one box to give them at least 2-4 channels at once so that they can record and watch tv in multiple rooms.

- Wireless, although it seems relatively acceptable that a wired connection is the best bet to stream HD content people don't always have the option and frankly the average person doesn't want to string 100ft of cable when they just payed $100 for a wireless router. A good alternative is the Powerline adapters, but they're generally not good enough for HD yet. Although eventually these two technologies will become good enough to stream HD it would certainly help if the 360 got a wireless-n adapter with 2.4ghz and 5ghz spectrum support.

- Time syncing every hour (by the way, will someone please fix time.windows.com? it's been broken for months!) The reason for time syncing is because I found that the clock on my Media Center PC would drift quite quickly but by only a matter of seconds, those seconds are however enough to make you miss the introduction of a news program or a tv show because networks generally run the program exactly at the time they say they will. I know it's just a registry hack away but I think the average person expects these days that when they click record it's going to get it from start to finish.

- Recording Sports ... sports programs almost always go over the time that was scheduled for them, so why not create some sort of way for Media Center to know if the game has ended? Perhaps a way to do this is tie the stuff that looks up sports scores with sports recordings? For example while Media Center is recording a game it should frequently check the score of the game until the score has come back as "Final" I don't think this be a big problem since Media Center already can figure out what game is on what channel and can pull up sports scores.

- Sports menu, when you pull up the menu that shows you all the games for that day and what channel and time they'll be on it'd be nice if media center didn't show just one channel for the game because sometimes a game will be on two or more channels and it'd be good if we could see and choose the channel. Especially since Media Center will choose SD over HD for any program unless you delete the SD channel, but I don't believe the average person is going to want to deal with that. Perhaps there should be a preference in setup for whether or not you want to record a program in HD over SD if it's available.

I also believe Microsoft should try and agressively market this device as an alternative to Tivo with these key points:
- No monthly fees for a box you already payed for.
- Tell people that the 360 is an extender and that it will down convert HD signals so that a regular old tube TV can be used to view HD channels. It may also be useful for the sake of helping people connect the dots by saying the 360 can essnetially act like thier Cable Box.
- Explain that thier content will always be with them even if they switch providers.
- Since Media Center runs on a computer the recording space is easily expandable!

I think Media Center is very easy to use and setup but the major barrior is all the technical jargon which in turn prevents people from understanding what they can do and what they need to do it. I actually wrote an essay for my english class (I know that sounds nerdy but it's not like I can cook or anything) about putting together a media center PC system with CableCard and 2 XBOX 360's. I spent 3 1/2 pages explaining the jargon and a paragraph explaining how to set it up.