Microsoft released Windows XP MCE 2004 today. Winsupersite published a review of Microsoft’s new MCE. To coincide with todays launch of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, Microsoft has also posted a few new PowerToys: “Alarm Clock” and “Playlist Editor” PowerToys.
Windows XP MCE 2004 Released
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Eugenia Loli
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HDTV aspect ratio, but no support for ATSC or any DTV signal. Instead, you have to watch NTSC on your widescreen HD set. Talk about a waste of money. I’ll stick with my homebrew VIA M10000 HDTV tuner PC. 600 bucks, and it actually works as my HD set would want it to – naely the right input and output resolutions, fancy that!
It was on WINSUPERSITE, good work….
wish that alarm clock thing worked on regular XP, don’t try it I all ready did. Curious what makes it MCE only. I don’t think it’s an app that people will buy a who MCE computer for. Furthermore I wish you could get WinXP MCE and install it on your own computer instead. I can see reason for doing it the way they do, but still. I think it’s one of the things holding it back from being a massive success.
I’m going to buy it as soon as it’s available.
The arguement about end user experience is just lame. MS can just give the same level of support they give with XP etc, ie none. I mean really, MS sells a lot of copies of XP that are not preinstalled. They don’t fret about supporting that. They should just do the same with MCE. Offer it for a little more than XP home and then as usual offer little affordable support. People will get by just as they do now. I mean big deal if they have to limit a few features because people don’t have hardware Mpeg for realtime watch/recordd. That sure isn’t stopping tons of people from using things like Freevo/MythTV/MYHTPC and Snapstream.
I for one although interested in MCE am not about to blow a grand on stupid OEM from Dell in order to get MCE. All MS is doing is losing out on sales.
Well few people are using the alternitives at this point because there not as complete or are hard to setup. Show shifter is probably the closest thing. But I don’t think anyone has anything as tight as MS does.
Really what MS is doing is what apple does. Selling it as a full package deal. So you know it’s going to work. Which is hardly a bad thing. At the same time like you said it would be nice to do it myself. But then people will start saying this and that and how it crashes and so forth when they try to get it to work on something it shouldn’t, or just to many not well enough tested drivers. So it’s a mixed bag.
Windows XP SE2 or Windows XP ME
1st a story about windows in your fridge and your watch, now they are in your tv, in your games console and your pc, your mobile phone, does anyone really think its ok for one company to have this much market share? if they get their way, microsoft == computing.
Go back to Slashdot, troll.
Microsoft got their monopoly by making the best products for the best prices. Don’t blame them, blame the people who buy their cell phones, Xboxs, watches and computers.
Too bad for you that about 90% of the population thinks computing == Microsoft.
Let’s put it in social-economical perspective: People will only move to a new product/service, if the price/quality ratio is better. Weird, isn’t it? Linux is (mostly) available for free and still the vast majority of people doesn’t migrate.
I, myself, do like Linux though, especially my RedHat 9 with Ximian Desktop 2.0
)
Why is it that the comments section of every other article on this site has to turn into a pissing contest ?
“Microsoft got their monopoly by making the best products for the best prices.”
What?
Instead of telling ‘earthworm’ to go back to Slashdot, why don’t you join us down here on Earth?
> Too bad for you that about 90% of the population
> thinks computing == Microsoft.
> Let’s put it in social-economical perspective:
> People will only move to a new product/service,
> if the price/quality ratio is better. Weird,
> isn’t it? Linux is (mostly) available for free
> and still the vast majority of people doesn’t migrate.
> I, myself, do like Linux though, especially
> my RedHat 9 with Ximian Desktop 2.0
)
The problem with linux is that the quality is still very low when compared to Linux for tasks the average desktop users use. Thats why no switch.
I dont know why Microsoft does not sell this. Development resources have already been put in, so it would cost too much on their side. I am sure tons of people will want to roll their own TIVO system.
> The problem with linux is that the quality is still
> very low when compared to Linux for tasks the
> average desktop users use. Thats why no switch.
Oops. I ment Linux quality low compared to Windows.
Most TV tuners do not have onboard MPEG-2 encoding. Without it, you would drop a lot of frames while recording if you were trying to do something else that used a lot of CPU. With hardware encoding, the biggest problem you should have is running out of hard drive bandwidth during recording.
Every damn article about Windows or the Mac and suddenly there are 200 posts about linux.
WTF does linux have to do with an article about XP MCE being released ?
Grow up you f**king twits
Nonsense. One can encode MPEG1 or QSIF MPEG2 or WMV at VHS quality in realtime @ 30fps using a 1Ghz+ CPU with no hardware acceleration. Higher resolution encoding can be done with a faster codec such as huffyuv which eliminates the disk bottleneck of just dumping all data to disk. Since only NTSC is supported, VHS quality of 320×240 or alternatively 320×480 is good enough.