My wife is quite the techy, and wants Vista MC on our Sony VGX-XL2 to do what our friends Tivo V3 does. Since she is not willing to spend the $2500 to upgrade to the VGX-Xl3 (now withdrawn from the market anyways), she's agreed that we need to spend the $550 to buy an R5000HD, reload the Sony VMC with Linux, and SageTV, and get a real solution that actually works properly, and allows the other 3 computers in the house to view my recorded content.  The fact that the new SageTV HD extenders are half the price, and that SageTV actually has a plugin for my Windows Home Server is really icing on the cake.

Sorry Microsoft..your team screwed up so badly on this, its not even funny. The love affair is over.

You can have me back as a customer once you get SoftSled working, get DirecTV working in a reasonably open manner, and fix cablecard. I simply refuse to deal with closed proprietary systems, OEMs that charge massive markups, and excessive DRM. Not when there is a perfectly good solution (R5000HD) that does the job.

Of course, the next step is to ditch my huge cable bill all together, and simply download all the HD programming I want from usenet and torrent. That is where Microsoft, Cablelabs, and the MPAA are trying to push us legitimate users, right? Because unless they stop this crap..thats where the market is going.

 

 

My wife wants:

DVB-T subtitles support

A way to change audio output back to HDMI audio when I have been using the VMC box with headphones chnaging the windows default playback device.

ildoc

.

 

 

 

Kinche:

She'd like built-in support for quick weather info.  Ideally, this would overlay current watch & warning info, informing us of potentially dangerous weather in our area when we're watching timeshifted TV, movies, etc.

Yes, handy weather would be good. MCE Weather was good, but some of the forecasts were in German.

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Windows Media Centre - The UK's most popular spelling mistake

If you want wife acceptance (what you really mean is acceptance by the lay-person), you need something that works flawlessly out of the box.  not more features, just rock solid TV, PVR and DVD player functionality that can be setup with minimal computer know-how.

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Intel DG965WH, 2GB Corsair Value Select, Core2Duo E6300, Seasonic S12-430W, ASUS 8600GT, Seagate HDs, Vistaview Saber2020, Vbox Cat's Eye 164e, Winegard SS-1000 Antenna w/ CM3042 amplifier

alanroy2:

Yes, handy weather would be good. MCE Weather was good, but some of the forecasts were in German.

It's terribly slow, but my wife loves that a five-day forecast is readily available on our DirecTV HD DVR.  I swear she could resume her laptop and hit a webpage in the time it takes to come up, but she likes it.

I have built, installed, and integrated Vista Media Center in more than a dozen homes. I used to think I was obsessive about the features media center was missing, I have realized however, that people who have media center, soon notice the lack of HD, Rec’d TV sharing, DVD streaming, and for goodness sake, the lack of extenders. The majority of my clients are in their 40’s or 50’s (They can afford technology, but it needs to be easy).  I can sell a $3,000 media center in less than 10 minutes – display “TiVo” capability, Pictures, Music, DVD player, and PC on a 50” flat panel, People are blown away! “Sign me up!”  The problem is, after owning a system for a month, they want more, most importantly HD. As much as I want to, I can’t support beta solutions like aver m780qam or HD home run.  I need something solid, or at least a TIME TABLE! Some days I just want to pull media center out of our show room, and put a TiVo and a sling box in its place. Microsoft can thank my wife for convincing me that what we have at home is worth sticking with, She would require 0 tech support from me, if qam tuning, and Rec’d TV sharing were built in to media center.

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Doug Vanden Berg www.vandenbergstereo.com

Why is this post dead?  Did we all get divorced all of a sudden because of Vista Media Center?

RichardAZ:

Why is this post dead?  Did we all get divorced all of a sudden because of Vista Media Center?

Hehe...I have been close when my Vista machine started bluescreening at one time and the Friday show she watches didn't record....

Works now, so my marrage is safe

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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)

RichardAZ:

Why is this post dead? 

Because no-one from MS came back to it.

cdrider:

RichardAZ:

Why is this post dead? 

Because no-one from MS came back to it.

Jessica was asking as one of the few woman what the wives of mostly male TGB members wanted.  What part of that had to do with Microsoft?

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Chris Lanier
The Green Button Forum Moderator

The fact the thread was started by a Microsoft person.

Who hasn't worked on the Media Center team for nearly a year and clearly noted it within the forum when she left.  You need to get real.  Just because someone starts a thread doesn't mean they need to say and reply to every post.  Jessica posted wanting feedback from men in the forum.  She had no reason to keep an active dialog, TGB members had all the reason too.  In every forum threads die, that's part of the forum.

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Chris Lanier
The Green Button Forum Moderator