Tikker:

guess I'll be going to Sage afterall

I'm not paying to downgrade my MCE machines to vista

I wouldn't consider Vista a downgrade.  When Vista first came out it was unstable and full of bugs, but as of roughly the August time frame (big patches...), it has worked very well.  Our primary HTPC, running Vista, hasn't blue screened or crashed even once since then, nor has my Vista PC in my study (I installed Vista 2 months ago on the old Gateway PC with an Athlon 64 3400+).  Vista is definitely a nice step up vs XP as far as PC functionality.

Vista Media Center is also a nice step up for everything except the management of pictures, videos, and music (folder management is now annoying) and the lack of parental controls for Canada (parental controls used to work in MCE2005).

Vista Media Center also now provides a great Recorded TV interface, complete with icons showing the actual show (even my youngest child at 5 could find her favorite shows without being able to read).

I expect that when the next Media Center release comes out, Vista Media Center will be even better compared to MCE2005 (although it will still fall far short of our expectations...).

Still, Sage TV is quite likely a better investment since it is more likely to support HD in Canada (it does today), provide DVD streaming to extenders, plus provide the ability to use other PCs as fully functional extenders.  Sage TV is essentially everything we've been screaming for 4+ years for Media Center to become...

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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

HT Slider:

I wouldn't consider Vista a downgrade......Vista Media Center is also a nice step up for everything except the management of pictures, videos, and music (folder management is now annoying) and the lack of parental controls for Canada (parental controls used to work in MCE2005).

the PVR portion of MCE is only about 15-20% of what I use my HTPC for. majority of usage is pictures, home movies, my DivX movie collection and music

I do have a vista premium dvd sitting on a shelf collecting dust, and maybe in a month or 2 I'll give it another shot, but overall, it was a HUGE downgrade to move my system to Vista.  I found it to be a resource pig, such that it was noticeable in the performance of the HTPC.

I dunno, we'll see what happens
I've got 2 virtually identical boxes, so it's pretty easy to stack them on top of each other, load different media apps on them, and compare side by side.  Sage will probably get a tryout next month

Tikker:

I do have a vista premium dvd sitting on a shelf collecting dust, and maybe in a month or 2 I'll give it another shot, but overall, it was a HUGE downgrade to move my system to Vista.  I found it to be a resource pig, such that it was noticeable in the performance of the HTPC.

I don't know why everyone says Vista is so slow.  On every PC I've tried it on, the user performance is a huge upgrade compared to XP/MCE2005.  Boot time is cut in about 1/2 and application startup time is almost instantaneous.

I agree it might be a little slower for the first 60 hours of uptime, but after that it does a great job of optimizing itself and it just gets faster and faster the more you use it.  The least RAM I've used with Vista is 1.25GB and currently all of our Vista PCs have 2.0GB of RAM.  At less than $40 per 2GB it isn't exactly expensive (if a lack of RAM is the issue you're having).

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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

HT Slider:

Tikker:

I do have a vista premium dvd sitting on a shelf collecting dust, and maybe in a month or 2 I'll give it another shot, but overall, it was a HUGE downgrade to move my system to Vista.  I found it to be a resource pig, such that it was noticeable in the performance of the HTPC.

I don't know why everyone says Vista is so slow.  On every PC I've tried it on, the user performance is a huge upgrade compared to XP/MCE2005.  Boot time is cut in about 1/2 and application startup time is almost instantaneous.

I agree it might be a little slower for the first 60 hours of uptime, but after that it does a great job of optimizing itself and it just gets faster and faster the more you use it.  The least RAM I've used with Vista is 1.25GB and currently all of our Vista PCs have 2.0GB of RAM.  At less than $40 per 2GB it isn't exactly expensive (if a lack of RAM is the issue you're having).

Vista performance really depends on RAM, and you are right, RAM is cheap, as long as it's DDR2 ram.  If you have a socket 939 system from AMD however, which uses DDr1 ram, that is VERY expensive now.  Essentially you're almost better off upgrading the whole system that feeding it lots of PC3200 memory. 

Video driver/ codec support in Vista is also more dicey than in XP.  MSFT threw EVR into the process, and DXVA-> DXVA2 translation etc... couple with lousy quality video card drivers make this a lot messier than it needs to be.

Also, Vista has some work that needs to be done in the networking stack, configuration of indexing and caching that isn't right for HTPC use, etc...  SP1 should fix most of that, at least if you are willing to make registry mods, but there are driver support issues for some sets of hardware that still don't work right etc...  For really new hardware, it shouldn't be that big a deal with SP1, but it's far from accurate to assert that Vista is not a performace pig on most hardware platforms.  I don't think that's the case. 

Tikker:

the PVR portion of MCE is only about 15-20% of what I use my HTPC for. majority of usage is pictures, home movies, my DivX movie collection and music

I use My Movies for home movies, my movie collection (including movies I want to keep that were recorded by Media Center).  Without it, Media Center would be a total loss (and even My Movies is rather clunky to use).  The same My Movies installs on both MCE2005 and on Vista.

Let us know how you like Sage TV.  To be honest I could easily see Sage TV eventually replacing Media Center in our household too.  Sage is definitely focusing on what the customer wants and it is quickly overtaking Media Center.  Even though I haven't really tried Sage TV enough, my ranking right now for meeting out needs would be #1 Sage TV, #2 Vista Media Center, #3 MCE2005.  The only thing really holding me back is I would need to purchase software for all 6 of our existing Media Center PCs not to mention learn/teach everyone a new interface plus set everything up.

Right now by combining FireSTB and an R5000HD modded STB Media Center does meet our needs reasonably well, but if it wasn't for FireSTB there is no way I'd have bought the new Vista licenses - instead it would have been spent on Sage TV.

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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

HT Slider:

Tikker:

the PVR portion of MCE is only about 15-20% of what I use my HTPC for. majority of usage is pictures, home movies, my DivX movie collection and music

I use My Movies for home movies, my movie collection (including movies I want to keep that were recorded by Media Center).  Without it, Media Center would be a total loss (and even My Movies is rather clunky to use).  The same My Movies installs on both MCE2005 and on Vista.

Let us know how you like Sage TV.  To be honest I could easily see Sage TV eventually replacing Media Center in our household too.  Sage is definitely focusing on what the customer wants and it is quickly overtaking Media Center.  Even though I haven't really tried Sage TV enough, my ranking right now for meeting out needs would be #1 Sage TV, #2 Vista Media Center, #3 MCE2005.  The only thing really holding me back is I would need to purchase software for all 6 of our existing Media Center PCs not to mention learn/teach everyone a new interface plus set everything up.

Right now by combining FireSTB and an R5000HD modded STB Media Center does meet our needs reasonably well, but if it wasn't for FireSTB there is no way I'd have bought the new Vista licenses - instead it would have been spent on Sage TV.

Again, that's the point.  Sage, even though they are a TINY company, focuses on exactly our needs.  Bothe fireware tuners and R5000-HD's are supported in Sage, and with the SageMC interface, my wife and kids were able to move to Sage pretty easily from MCE.  MyMovies was a loss, but SageMC with DVD profiler gets you close, not quite there, but the ability to have true multiroom integrated MC features was enough to get me to switch. 

BTW, what channels in your cable system are sent with 5C off?  Quite a few, or just a few?

PS Good news on the VMC driver coming from Hauppauge.  They do also seem to acknowledge that MSFT has to make mods as well to have it function under VMC, so we'll have to see when that will get enabled.  I think it's probably too late to see it ship as part of SP1.

mikesm:

Vista performance really depends on RAM, and you are right, RAM is cheap, as long as it's DDR2 ram.  If you have a socket 939 system from AMD however, which uses DDr1 ram, that is VERY expensive now.  Essentially you're almost better off upgrading the whole system that feeding it lots of PC3200 memory. 

Actually I upgraded the RAM a couple of months ago in the MSI-7145/Athlon 64 3400+ based Gateway PC I'm typing on right now.  It uses DDR PC3200 RAM and 2GB cost me something like $50 Canadian at TigerDirect.ca.  The RAM was on sale, but there are almost always sales available somewhere.

mikesm:

Video driver/ codec support in Vista is also more dicey than in XP.  MSFT threw EVR into the process, and DXVA-> DXVA2 translation etc... couple with lousy quality video card drivers make this a lot messier than it needs to be.

In the beginning DXVA2 was a major pain.  I also agree if you have an AGP based system - don't bother with Vista (DXVA2 basically doesn't work with AGP).  On the other hand with this Gateway PC, I absolutely could never get HD to play smoothly with it under MCE2005.  It has an Nvidia 6800 PCIe video card (NV41) and now under Vista Home Premium all of our WMV HD and mpeg-2 HD content (Recorded TV) plays back flawlessly.  This includes 720p, 1080i and 1080p.  None of this would play without stuttering terribly in MCE2005, yet with Vista all of it "just works".

In my experience the drivers that ATI and Nvidia have now for Vista seem to work at least as well as their MCE2005 versions.  Go back 6 months ago and that wasn't the case, but our systems are rock solid now.

mikesm:

Also, Vista has some work that needs to be done in the networking stack, configuration of indexing and caching that isn't right for HTPC use, etc...  SP1 should fix most of that, at least if you are willing to make registry mods, but there are driver support issues for some sets of hardware that still don't work right etc...  For really new hardware, it shouldn't be that big a deal with SP1, but it's far from accurate to assert that Vista is not a performance pig on most hardware platforms.  I don't think that's the case. 

What are the networking issues?  Our primary Media Center PC, running serves all of our content to our 5 other Media Center PCs (3 running MCE2005) and I've never noticed so much as a hiccup.  This includes HD content (including Recorded TV), music, pictures as well as PC backups (we use the primary Media Center PC as our network server for everything).

Even running Vista on our old ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe based system, running an Athlon XP 3200+ with only 1.25GB of RAM Vista was at least as fast as MCE2005 at everything.  Boot time especially was much faster.  The issue with this system was the lack of DXVA2 support with the AGP motherboard.  Everything else worked fast and flawlessly - except no matter how expensive a video card I tried I could not get HD to play smoothly (again this is specifically an AGP issue with Vista so if anyone has AGP hardware I'd recommend they stick with MCE2005 if they want HD to be watchable).

I agree Vista isn't perfect and Vista Media Center is still missing the most essential pieces required to make a great Media Center, but in my experience it is a step up from MCE2005 for any hardware with PCIe video - and I've used both Vista and MCE2005 allot.

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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

From Ian Kennedy Microsoft eHome team "The good news is we have H.264 playback up and running now for the next release"

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Richard Miller Media Center MVP 2006

holy f*ing crap....I've only been waiting for this cap board for like 3yrs now!  now I'm glad that I just rebuilt my vista MC "server" in the basement with extra horsepower.  I was about to scrap the entire setup and goto Sage but decided it was better to just stick with a new vista build for the moment and not try deal with the issues of setting up something completely new.  now I just need to grab a couple of these boards, put both HD STBs in the basement, get channel changing to work via the old Tim Moore firestb stuff (hopefully) and enjoy.

now about that VOB support :-x

mikesm:

PS Good news on the VMC driver coming from Hauppauge.  They do also seem to acknowledge that MSFT has to make mods as well to have it function under VMC, so we'll have to see when that will get enabled.  I think it's probably too late to see it ship as part of SP1.

The way I read the Hauppage e-mail I suspect we'll see support for HD tuner cards along with the next Media Center release (major update through Windows Update).

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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

HT Slider:

I don't know why everyone says Vista is so slow.  On every PC I've tried it on, the user performance is a huge upgrade compared to XP/MCE2005.  Boot time is cut in about 1/2 and application startup time is almost instantaneous.

I agree it might be a little slower for the first 60 hours of uptime, but after that it does a great job of optimizing itself and it just gets faster and faster the more you use it.  The least RAM I've used with Vista is 1.25GB and currently all of our Vista PCs have 2.0GB of RAM.  At less than $40 per 2GB it isn't exactly expensive (if a lack of RAM is the issue you're having).

I do only have 1gb ram in my HTPCs, and boot time is mostly a non issue. the boxes are never shutdown, just in standby, and that's about a 2-3 second wakeup time

if you can find 2gb of pc3200 ram, i'll gladly buy it for 40 bucks ;)

Richard A Miller:

From Ian Kennedy Microsoft eHome team "The good news is we have H.264 playback up and running now for the next release"

Am I to assume that this will never be available in XP MCE 2005 is that coming as well?

mikesm:

BTW, what channels in your cable system are sent with 5C off?  Quite a few, or just a few?

Nothing is 5C protected or protected in any way.

The R5000HD extracts the transport stream and passes it through USB so it can be recorded on the local PC (using specific R5000HD DVR software that is controlled by the FireSTB addin).  Due to DMCA laws the R5000HD can only be installed on STBs that do not include protected outputs.  My STB is an old component only system, but now with the R5000HD, it and Vista Media Center has been converted into a digital HD-PVR.  The image quality is amazing compared to the old Hauppage PVR-250 (we actually still use it for SD due to a bug in VMC - hopefully it won't be there with the next release; and FireSTB continues to work).

I don't expect Media Center to officially support the R5000HD in the future, but Sage TV does today and will continue to.  What I am hoping is this Hauppage HD-PVR will be supported by Media Center so we'll have a future path that will continue to provide HD when our STB stops being supported (it only supports mpeg-2, not mpeg-4).  I'd much prefer to see a supported digital recording path for Vista Media Center with Bell ExpressVu in the future, but I don't know if we'll ever see it...

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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

from sales@hauppage.com:

We will have Vista Media Center drivers for the new HD board.  Microsoft will probably have HD support at the same time.

Regards,

Dorothy

Did you ask specifically about Vista drivers - can we make any inferences from the above response that there will be no support for this card in XP from Hauppauge's perspective?