Hi Jess,

the latest problem my wife has with Vista MC - is that when you press the power button to turn it off, it seems to take forever to actually go to sleep - this was never a problem with MCE05, where if the pc wasn't actually recording, it would have gone to sleep by the time she's put the remote control down - anything we can do to improve this would be great!

Tony

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AMD64X2 6000+ | 3Gb Ram | 750Gb Maxtor SATA TV | 200Gb Samsung Spinpoint for Vista | ASUS M3N 78 PRO | FloppyDTV + Dragon CAM | Pinnacle 7010ix | XFX 8600GT Silent Video Card | LG Blu-ray/HD DVD Drive | Xbox 360 | Arcsoft Total Theatre

Wife mentioned this one to me last night.

1) When in Recorded TV when you are watching a recorded show, if you push stop it goes back to the index TV listing in MCE Vista.  In MCE 2005 it went back to the page for the show you were watching so you could easily resume or delete it.  She likes the 2005 behavior b/c typically when she is done watching a show she will push stop (or back) to delete it.  But now she has to push enter again on the show b/c it goes back to the listings instead of the show info for what she was watching.

She wants one simple thing--the 2K5 interface.  Period.  I've try to show her all the typical responses to the 'its a better interface once u get to know it...' but it falls on deaf ears.  Gimme the ability to customize the interface back to the mce 2k5 & she's all yours!

 

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Matt O.
...tivo what?
...dish dvr--uh... huh?
...cable dvr fees--you're kidding, right?

She wants Away Mode to not mute the system.  Or, she wants the PC to come out of Away Mode before going to sleep after a recording.  Or, she wants the "Vol +" key on the remote to pull the system out of Mute.

Whenever the HTPC is put to sleep during a recording, it'll put itself in Away Mode until the recording is finished, and then it will go to sleep.  When she tries to wake the PC back up, she always comes to me saying that the sound is "broken", when in fact, it's still muted from being in Away Mode. 

I press "Mute", and it's back to normal.  An easy fix, but it'd be nice to not worry about it.  If "Vol +" cancelled the Mute command, I could program my Harmony remote to send "Vol +" on wake-up, and I'd be all set.

HT Slider:

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.

At the very least, it'd be nice to have per-channel memory on zoom control (instead of the current per-tuning-space memory).  Right now, all ATSC channels share the same zoom setting in memory.  However, half of my ATSC channels are 4:3, and the rest are 16:9.

Ahhh....the WAF!  The single item resposible for more progress within MCE than all other factors combined!  So far, my setup has garnered the coveted Wife Seal of Approvale thanks to the work done here: http://thegreenbutton.com/blogs/ghostlobster/archive/2007/05/31/190451.aspx

However, there are still items missing:

1 - The 'Favorites' button for TV channel surfing.  This could be implemented via a TV Channel Profile function or something like that, but as I've said several times, she wants to just hit one button and get taken to the next channel in her Favorite Channel listing.

2 - HD-DVD support within MCE.  It's infuriating to her that we can't just pop in a HD-DVD and have it play within the Media Center interface.  Yeah, I've got PowerDVD installed and have it set up to auto launch when a HD DVD is inserted, but that's sloppy at best.  Come on guys...the HD-DVD standard has been around long enough for you to integrate this functionality.  The delay in providing it is bordering on inexcusable.

3 - Real digital TV support.  Not the CableCARD nightmare that's been thrust upon us, but the ability for me to use my existing rig to get all of the HD channels we currently get.  I'd even switch to Dish or DirecTV if that would accomodate this.  Right now, we're just using the HDHomeRun for QAM support, which is pretty much only the locals.

4 - The ability to listen to her music while watching either live TV or recorded TV.  She likes to just have her shows on, while reading a book or a magazine and have some music playing rather than the TV audio.  Yeah, I know, it's a bit of a sensory overload, but that's what she likes!

5 - A quiet device that will provide all of the functionality of our MC box to other rooms in the house.  OK, you and I read that as a V2 extender, but to perfectly honest with you, she does not care if it's an extender...she just wants those capabilities to be in other rooms, and the 360 is way too noisy to be a bedroom extender.  Of course, it would be really sweet to take on of the other nice, quiet Media Center PCs I have and turn THOSE into extenders, but that's probably asking way too much!

6 - A simple way to queue up a bunch of TV recordings and let them just play.  She generally gets about 20 episides of House Hunters recorded throughout the week.  Then, on Sunday mornings when I go play golf, she sits on the couch with a newspaper and plows through them, skipping over the boring stuff (the entire show, in my opinion!) and whacking them out one at a time.  She's mentioned on several times "Why can't I just hit "Play" on the first page of these recordings and have it just play them all!?"  Great question!

7 - Less of a Rat's Nest of wires...oh wait, that's my doing...nothng you guys can help with there!

 

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Ghostlobster
Very happy convert to SageTV! Finally, watching ESPN-HD in real HD on my HTPC without having to deal with the CableCARD fiasco!

My wife is pretty happy with media center in general.  We have been using mce in one form or another for 3 years.  We recently built a new home and moved in with her parents for 3 weeks as our home was not quite ready on time.  It was quite funny to see her frustration with her parents cogeco PVR (live in canada).  I had to dig the media center out of storage because she had grown so accustomed to the MCE UI.

I think your question is still a little difficult to answer, after all, yes you may be asking for our wives opnions but don't forget, our wives live with gear heads that take great pain to hide some of mce's rough edges.

To answer your question, here are her requests:

1) more customization - click a mom button on the remote and bring up, mom's music, mom's recordings, etc.  Click on a the child button on the remote and bring up appropriate content, G rated movies, recorded tv, music, etc.

2) Make a kitchen media center with some "kitcheny stuff" (ie, My recipes, Family Calendar, Family White board, answering machine).

3) Vista MCE is nice, but it's, still a computer, hide all that computer mumbo jumbo.  I want it to act like a DVD player, quiet, instant on, off).

4) I want to watch HD on the media center - I hate having to change to my cablebox to watch HD.

(we have an OTA tuner but only get a few channels,)

 

Mark

Hamilton, Ontario

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"There are only 10 types of people in the
world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't"

My VMC HTCP - Vista Ultimate x64
ASUS P5Q, Core 2 Duo 3.15 Ghz
4GB DDR2-800, XFX 9800GT
1 X TB,ATI 550Pro, HDHOMERUN
Linksys 2100, 360, WHS

More reliable sleep system. 

• My computers sleep was perfect until I installed a bluetooth keyboard and mouse... now without the help os MCE Standby Tool, it stays awake forever.
  
  Found the problem to be that even though I turned off ALL instances of my usb root hub and keyboard and mouse being able to wake the computer... somewhere buried in the depths of Vista was another option (yet to be found) that kept the mouse able to wake the computer.
  
  Mce Standby tool was able to find this ability and stop it.
  
• AAC support built into MC... I couldn't find a codec that would let me see my MP4 files in vista mc... even though people said it shows up in theirs.
  
• Blu-ray/HD-DVD support built into MC... My wife doesn't undestand why we have to watch hd-dvds and bluray on a different player, if the "HTPC is soOoOo awesome, it should be able to do that on its own"   (I'm still not keen on using a third party player, I like to lock MC and don't like to leave it much.)
  
• Include right click options during DVD playback to change audio tracks, subtitles and other options.

MrPCrook:

1.   Picture in Picture

2.   Record direct to Disc, she can not understand why her friends £60.00 DVD recorder can record straight to disc but our £1200 Media center cannot.

 

GOOD ONE!!!!!  Big complaint in my house as well!

Our family loves media center (3 xbox extenders...computer in a closet).

My wife's biggest issue (and one that keeps me from cablecard) is that she can only watch content *on her computer* via windows media *player*.  If I go cablecard, she is going to get all the restricted content issues.  So, her #1 issue is that she can't run windows media center on one computer as an extender.

The only other gripe I hear about is the slowness of wmv ff/rew. 

Thanks,

-- Rick

ieko:

- 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.

Use time-b.nist.gov instead of the other server

also if you set it to automatically sync if should sync every day or two days i believe.

SoundForSound:

Wife mentioned this one to me last night.

1) When in Recorded TV when you are watching a recorded show, if you push stop it goes back to the index TV listing in MCE Vista.  In MCE 2005 it went back to the page for the show you were watching so you could easily resume or delete it.  She likes the 2005 behavior b/c typically when she is done watching a show she will push stop (or back) to delete it.  But now she has to push enter again on the show b/c it goes back to the listings instead of the show info for what she was watching.

 

This doesn't happen on mine... wierd.

maxmcleod:

ieko:

- 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.

Use time-b.nist.gov instead of the other server

also if you set it to automatically sync if should sync every day or two days i believe.

Which isn't often enough for PC hardware, especially when you need to sync to a broadcast. I've lost the beginnings or endings of more shows because I forgot to hack the registry of a rebuilt OS...

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-- jcf

maxmcleod:

SoundForSound:

Wife mentioned this one to me last night.

1) When in Recorded TV when you are watching a recorded show, if you push stop it goes back to the index TV listing in MCE Vista.  In MCE 2005 it went back to the page for the show you were watching so you could easily resume or delete it.  She likes the 2005 behavior b/c typically when she is done watching a show she will push stop (or back) to delete it.  But now she has to push enter again on the show b/c it goes back to the listings instead of the show info for what she was watching.

 

This doesn't happen on mine... wierd.

If you watch a show, and never do anything else, it'll "fall back" to the info page for a show. In 2k5, it did that always. In Vista, it "falls back" to the last page you were on -- so if you thumb through the guide during a commercial, then look at your recorded TV, then used the icon in the lower-left corner to get back to your show, it will "fall back" to the recorded TV page you were last on.

When you stack up 40 or 50 recordings, it can be a pain to find the show you were just watching in the list, and delete it from there.

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-- jcf

jcf:

If you watch a show, and never do anything else, it'll "fall back" to the info page for a show. In 2k5, it did that always. In Vista, it "falls back" to the last page you were on -- so if you thumb through the guide during a commercial, then look at your recorded TV, then used the icon in the lower-left corner to get back to your show, it will "fall back" to the recorded TV page you were last on.

The "fix", BTW, is to use the "back" button on the remote, and not use the icon to go back to the show you were watching -- also inelegant.

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-- jcf