Media Center 2005

[mahleumon]

This question has probably already been asked, but I didn't find it when I searched for it.

Can you mutiboot Media Center 2005 and Windows Xp?

I would bet you could, but I have no experience with Media Center, so I am not sure.

Thanks

[CoffeeFiend]

You can, but I don't know if I'd want to waste money on MCE 2005... Lots of products like that, and they all fail to deliver, but perhaps I'm just expecting too much.

[MrCobra]

Actually, MCE 2005 is doing pretty good right now. Nothing more than just an add on tho. Still nice.

[CoffeeFiend]

Still nice.

Actually, there is a LOT of very similar products today by tons of companies

Meedio (ex myHTPC), Cyberlink PowerCinema, Intervideo HomeTheater, MythTV, SnapStream, SageTV, BeyondTV, ShowShifter, MainConcept PVR.. .. .. .. .

The list is almost endless. They mostly all suck imho. Yes, the interface and concept is nice (in most cases, anyways).

The problem is, not only they're not geared towards HDTV, but they're mostly geared towards analog cable. Analog cable is already pretty ugly looking. Some do have IR blasters and such to control set top boxes and such, but you're still taking so-so quality 480i stuff, decoding it (it's not perfect decoding), passing it thru cheap DACs, lots of filters and wires, sampling it with cheap and not well calibrated ADCs (BIG loss of quality) and recompressing it on the fly to some other lossy algorythm... I mean, the source didn't look too great to start with, after all this, it still looks better than VHS, but paying all this money to buy the software (and most of the time, they need an expensive hardware capture card instead of using software mpeg2 encoding), so the price tag is quite high for the quality we get...

I just wish they came out with something like, a digital port (kinda like we use now for miniDV transfers) that would plug to a firewire card or similar on your PC, and copy bit for bit the incoming digital stream off the set top box with no quality loss, decent filesizes, and not much cpu useage (just like we can do now with dvb cards or with real PVRs provided by satellite/cable companies). Even if it involves heavy DRM. I'm not asking for HD or real DVD quality, but just no worse than the "just ok" quality stuff that's broadcasted. I really see no point paying all that money for such mediocre quality.

But again, of course, even if it makes too much sense, it's definately asking too much. Other than that, yes, the interfaces are getting nicer