dravor:

I totally hear your argument.  Here's my thing, I understand if you are making this argument on behalf of Vista Media Center Users all over the world and would agree there.  I just find it silly that all of the people posting on here, complaining about this, know damn well that one way or another they will get the patch.  Everyone is acting as if this TV Pack requires some new license we won't have..... It doesn't.  Anyone on this board knows how to get a hold of this, and in turn we are more than likely going to get support from each other on this board.

So my question is, who is it that you are fighting for?  You've got the TV Pack, and you will continue to get support.  Surely sometime in December Dell will add the support for the XPS 420.  At that point no one would know the difference.

Again, I understand your argument and your point, but it's a moot point now that anyone who wants the TV Pack can get it.

You're right, I really don't have a valid complaint, it is the principal of the matter that I have a problem with.

Please Please MS give us the HD content, its got to be the best upgrade you can give.

The beta version works great and I will be really dissapointed when it bombs out.

I still cant beleive its been missed out from the Beta, surely the Beta testers were raving about it?

sigh....  I have a lengthy post I wanted to put here, but the forum keeps giving me AJAX errors when I try to post it.

My conclusion was that if TV Pack is truly considered illegal, I'd urge Chris to remove all of the links to it on TGB.  Leaving it here is an indirect endorsement of its use.

millerbrad:

sigh....  I have a lengthy post I wanted to put here, but the forum keeps giving me AJAX errors when I try to post it.

My conclusion was that if TV Pack is truly considered illegal, I'd urge Chris to remove all of the links to it on TGB.  Leaving it here is an indirect endorsement of its use.

I would tend to agree, but it seems clear that Jeff has decided to leave them up, and at the end of the day its on the net now so nothing can really be done to remove it.

That being said, people can claim they "should" have it and by proxy say they aren't holding software they shouldn't have. People are allowed to have their own opinions, but I take the view that if you have something you aren't supposed to, then you are doing something either illegal or unethical... take your pick.

If you don't like how MS treats you, I am sure other companies would love your business, but please don't blaim Jeff for issues you have with software you shouldn't be using in the first place.

SESnut:

JeffTucker – MSFT:

• The TV Pack release has gone through several evolutions over time, and in the end... we could not deliver everything our enthusiast community was expecting.  We could, however, deliver a really great OEM experience, and do it in parallel with our efforts for the next major windows release (which like it or not... IS our primary release vehicle at the moment).

the problem with the last part of that statement is, its sounds like youve dropped support for an existing and active product

i dont see how microsoft can contradict themselves by saying they want to you stop using xp and use vista and then have have an existing team ignore vista and work on windows 7

whats to stop this from happening again come windows 7 and the ehome team is working on stuff for windows 8?

I read his post as they have moved focus to Win7. That doesn't mean they will stop patching/hotfixing things.

They still do those for 2k5 on occasion.

CycleWriter:

JeffTucker – MSFT:

...the TV Pack that are clearly pirated...

Jeff, please stop saying this. It is insulting to be accused of criminality for doing nothing more than availing ourselves of something that should have been provided to us in the first place. And this is a free product that was not stolen, but provided to the community. How that happened may be up for debate, but continuing to call us pirates while trying to convince us how you care about the MC community is disingenuous, at best. I know that's not the feeling you want to convey.

I don't understand the logic?

You buy a car, does that mean the automaker owes you a new model when they come out?

To follow the analogy, you found someone that took a car off lot and he gives it to you.

If you get caught don't you still get charged for possesion of stolen goods?

aanda69:

Jeff,

I have to agree with CycleWriter here. You are saying anyone that downloaded this pack is engaged in software piracy, yet you left the link on this site and even winked at people who asked about it. I for one assumed (incorreectly) that as it was being linke to on a microsoft owned site whith the moderators full knowledge that this was going to be released to the wider community at some time and microsoft did not have any issue with people having access to it. Now I am accused of software piracy( I own every copy of software ) That is very insulting.

I think Ben says it best - http://bjdraw.com/2008/08/11/thanks-to-microsoft-for-giving-the-tv-pack-to-chuck/

millerbrad:

sigh....  I have a lengthy post I wanted to put here, but the forum keeps giving me AJAX errors when I try to post it.

My conclusion was that if TV Pack is truly considered illegal, I'd urge Chris to remove all of the links to it on TGB.  Leaving it here is an indirect endorsement of its use.

The problem with taking it down is that it is a worthless fight.  I can spend hours everyday deleting stuff just for it to be posted again 30 minutes laters.  That endless fighting leads to everyone saying that Microsoft is taking away their free speech, censoring the forum, etc.  That leads to even more problems that I don't want to deal with.

The deal is that we are not going to remove links to stuff like the TV Pack, but downloading and using the software is not supported by Microsoft.  For something like the TV Pack lets forget about the legality of the download and just stick an unsupported and looked down upon label on it.

BTW, the indirect endorement statement kind of sums up the whole thing.  When Microsoft took over the forum a big worry was what they would do with hacks to Media Center (registry, dll, etc).  Yes by leaving them up some might consider it an indirect endoresment from Microsoft to use them, but by taking them down we would be changing TGB to exactly what we don't want.  If the forum decides that the indirect endoresment of programs is a problem, then Jeff and I can talk about it and have a new policy drafted.  However, that's not what I want and it isn't what TGB members really want either.

rgreenpc:

I would tend to agree, but it seems clear that Jeff has decided to leave them up, and at the end of the day its on the net now so nothing can really be done to remove it. That being said, people can claim they "should" have it and by proxy say they aren't holding software they shouldn't have. People are allowed to have their own opinions, but I take the view that if you have something you aren't supposed to, then you are doing something either illegal or unethical... take your pick. If you don't like how MS treats you, I am sure other companies would love your business, but please don't blaim Jeff for issues you have with software you shouldn't be using in the first place.

I want to do the right thing, but I really don't know what the right thing is when it comes to this TV Pack.  Mostly because of this...

JeffTucker – MSFT:

You didn't see me pull the link, did you? 

For all the grief people are giving Jeff about TV Pack, I think it's absolutely perfect.  I can even understand the decision to keep it OEM for the time being, if the limited hardware compatibility really is true.

I am still a bit curious about some aspects of TV Pack that some might consider bugfixes.  Will these be extended to VMC users?  For example, pre-TV Pack, video on my NBC-HD affiliate would momentarily pixellate into a black screen when I skipped forward though video. TV Pack fixed this. 

Then there's ATSC subchannel guide data.  Jeff's made it pretty clear that this won't make its way to non-TV Pack VMC.  I know that even Jess, when she frequented the forum, used some semantic gymnastics to make sure that the lack of ATSC guide data was not labelled a bug.  I think that this picture summed up the conversations... 

So the TV Pack is OEM and not offically distributed as a free upgrade.

If you needed to buy a copy of the Vista, will an OEM disc with the TV pack be available at places like newegg.com?

I will agree with you that quite often the issues we have are things that should be fixed...

"We" have to hold MS accountable to fix things, but subguide data isn't a bug, its the lack of a feature.

The terms are exclusive of each other.

Your issue with video was a bug, I am curious why TVP would have fixed that, but I have learned to never question the ways of the mighty MS.

arandazz:

So the TV Pack is OEM and not offically distributed as a free upgrade.

If you needed to buy a copy of the Vista, will an OEM disc with the TV pack be available at places like newegg.com?

No it will be available only from OEM computer manufacturers.

Chris - Moderator:

If the forum decides that the indirect endoresment of programs is a problem, then Jeff and I can talk about it and have a new policy drafted.  However, that's not what I want and it isn't what TGB members really want either.

Indirectly endorsing unsupported unofficial software is one thing.  Endorsing illegal software is another.

I would think forbidding outright illegal activities would be totally acceptable.  That would allow you to prevent people from posting blatantly illegal things like downloads of Vista or other "wArEz".  TV Pack's leak appears to be either "unofficial", or somewhere between "unofficial" and "illegal" judging by your referral to it as pirated.

I can see the person who leaked it being at fault by violating their NDA.  But what about those who downloaded it?

millerbrad:

Chris - Moderator:

If the forum decides that the indirect endoresment of programs is a problem, then Jeff and I can talk about it and have a new policy drafted.  However, that's not what I want and it isn't what TGB members really want either.

Indirectly endorsing unsupported unofficial software is one thing.  Endorsing illegal software is another.

I would think forbidding outright illegal activities would be totally acceptable.  That would allow you to prevent people from posting blatantly illegal things like downloads of Vista or other "wArEz".  TV Pack's leak appears to be either "unofficial", or somewhere between "unofficial" and "illegal" judging by your referral to it as pirated.

I can see the person who leaked it being at fault by violating their NDA.  But what about those who downloaded it?

Judging by Jeff's comments they aren't forming lynch mobs, they just won't be going out of their way to provide support.

I'll let you in on something, a lot of hacks posted in this website can be considered illegal if you base it off the one legal document we have, the EULA.  Hacked dll (ex. RDP hack)?  That's "illegal" based on the EULA.

Now, I said in one of this threads that if somewhere were to post a link to a cracked Vista ISO or Photoshop that I would delete it.  Given this, you can draw your own conclusion about how I really feel about the TV Pack being "illegal."  I haven't opened the foum up to warez, and as others have said the definition of what the TV Pack is at this point is really just semantics.