I meant to do this last December/January but it just wouldn’t come up on the “I have time to do” list. Well my XP Media Center started acting really weird with stuttering sound the last few days and acting like it was out of resource but it had plenty of CPU, RAM, and disk IOPS available. I did a checkdisk and it showed some bad data issues so obviously something went pear shaped.
I figured I could troubleshoot it or I could just do what I have been meaning to do the last seven months and upgrade it to Vista this evening. If it blows up on the upgrade or doesn’t fix the issue, what did I really lose?
So I ran through the upgrade and it went quite well. The one thing that I did that turned things sour was when I went through the video configuration routine. I let it choose what it wanted to do and it completely screwed up the picture quality. It looked like a bad satellite signal for everything it played including stuff I had saved from before that I knew looked great, tons of pixelization and interlace/scan lines, etc. So I rolled it back to the last hotfixes I applied right after the OS load and before the Media Center Configuration and told it to skip the auto config for the video stuff and all is pretty good now. The picture quality still isn’t what I recall for XP Media Center but it is good enough.
I really like the performance enhancements, much faster. I am not a fan of the new look of the recorded shows. I don’t need to see a picture of the show to know what it is. I’m sure it will grow on me but I miss the summary of how many hours of TV are currently recorded. It was good for me to see because then I knew if they had a BattleStar Galactica day on sci-fi or something and I now had 30 BSG episodes from the 70’s to delete.
I was sort of hoping to see some of the more logical things broken out into menu options like show all conflicts, specify date ranges for original air dates of shows (so I don’t get the 30 BSG episodes from the 70’s recorded in the first place), etc.
I am expecting I need to dig out the Media Center SDK and look through to see how difficult it would be to put in the features that I think should be there. That will happen the day I get so pissed off about something and it becomes my number one irk-item on my list I guess. Or I guess if I figure out a way to make some cash on it. 🙂
You should give Media Portal a shot, it blows MCE away by a mile and its free with a great community.
http://www.team-mediaportal.com/
Daniel: Thanks for the link Daniel, that looks interesting. I also want to play with Myth TV as well. I just need more time in the week. 🙂