Hi everyone,

I've got some minor but very frustrating issues with Vista Media Center.  VMC seems to have a lot of potential, yet it lacking a lot of user friendly or user customizability options.  There option menu doesn't give you much control over your media experience.  There’s not even a option for video, and oh lord the problems one can run into just using your home videos with Media Center.

I use Movie Maker in Vista Ultimate for my home videos, and I save them as AVI's, so I can edit them easily if I decide to later.  I also make a extra copy of each one and convert the copy to mpeg 2, which works and plays fine in Vista, and Media Center.  Using Vista I can see the thumbnails with no problem, and the length of the video, everything works great.  When I try to view these same identical clips in VMC, all I get is black thumbnails, and the lengths of the clips are all unknown.  It is very annoying trying to find a clip that you want to watch, and have to hover over each black clip to find the name, and then you forget which black clips you went over already.  It's like playing the game of match, and trying to remember where you have been.  There should be a option to turn off Thumbnails in Media Center only, and keep the thumbnails in Vista, since they work just fine in Vista. I guess one shouldn't have to do any of that since Media Center is in Vista, and should just work.  When the videos are first added, they are blue with the name on them, which is fine, since I can see the name on each clip, but then the black thumbnails kick in, and it's like a virus with black thumbnails popping up all over my videos.  And no, the videos don't start with a black fade or anything before anyone asks.

I really wish the developers would take note, and fix some of these minor yet annoying