Advantage of MCE?

[spacesurfer]

Can someone explains what is the advantage of MCE?

I have an HDTV that I can connect to my laptop with a RBG cable. Thus, I can play HD movies from my laptop on the TV using Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic.

So, would I benefit from MCE because the only thing I see that is in MCE is the addition of the Media Center which I really don't need.

So, what is the advantage of MCE?

Also, are there any remote controls additions out there that I can use to play, pause, etc?

Thanks.

[CoffeeFiend]

I have an HDTV that I can connect to my laptop with a RBG cable.

Component video isn't RGB, it's YPrPb. Not the same thing at all.

Thus, I can play HD movies from my laptop on the TV using Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic.

No need for MCE to do that.

So, would I benefit from MCE because the only thing I see that is in MCE is the addition of the Media Center which I really don't need.

MCE = Media Center Edition, as in, Windows with Media Center. So yes, the only addition MCE provides is Media Center.

So, what is the advantage of MCE?

MCE isn't a movie player, or a way to play movies on your HDTV. It's more like a Tivo/PVR. It can record stuff (assuming you have a suitable capture card), show them on TV, check the TV guide, has built-in remote support, works with media center extenders, etc.

Also, are there any remote controls additions out there that I can use to play, pause, etc?

Most decent remote control solutions can be configured to do that, by sending the right key presses to any media player.

Personally, I very much dislike MCE. Doesn't work with DVB (-S/S2/T/etc) cards. The only 2 real options you have with MCE, is a SD analog capture card (disgusting picture quality IMO), or ATSC tuners (only useful if there are some ATSC feeds in your area in the first place). Well, it's supposed to have CableCard support too, but that's only good for cable (which I don't have), and ~99.999% or so of cable companies worldwide don't use it, and they don't sell such card readers anyways so you'd have to buy a pre-made MCE PC for that (even then, most companies who sell MCE boxes don't include that). I don't like how the menus are laid out and where stuff is located (you can't really change anything to that either), it was a pain to make it see most of the videos I had, it doesn't really organize them in an intelligent manner, etc. And its resource usage is quite high (I've seen it use hundreds of MBs of RAM). As for playback, it's not exactly the best (full featured) media player either. And the MCE remotes are stupidly designed, so they're mostly useless for anything else (some buttons send WM_APPCOMMAND messages instead of WM_INPUT messages) -- unless you're willing to try 3rd party drivers for it, buy a copy of girder, and spending hours to configure each button for every single app by hand... And recently, some people discovered MCE didn't their shows because of the broadcast flag.

I don't really have anything good to say about MCE... If you want a good PVR system, look at MythTV. It's more complex to setup, but it's far superior in every aspect (funnily, MCE remotes work FAR better under Linux...)