Wednesday, October 6, 2004
eHomeUpgrade: "Microsoft Media Center 2005... Underwhelmed"
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "ARTICLE" @ 06:00 PM
"Ok… so to start with, how can Media Center 2005 NOT have HDTV capability for satellite and cable receivers? What the hell? TiVo announces back in January 2003 and delivers earlier this year and MCE has an opportunity to do a major release on their product and it doesn’t include HDTV support? Something is seriously amiss in Redmond. Although the product allegedly will support the ATI HDTV Wonder card it is my understanding that this card only supports OTA (over the air) HDTV broadcasts. WTF? You mean I can watch NBC in high def but not HBO, Showtime, Bravo, Discovery HD, etc. etc.? Obviously they have not seen Discovery HD Theater yet."
We have been talking about XP MCE for several months now and have already talked about what will be new in MCE 2005, but now that it has been announced, several people are pointing out the things that are clearly lacking. This article by eHomeUpgrade is a good example that mentions the weirdnesses with HDTV support as well as DVD player reliability, while also giving a list of some of the new features of the OS. On a positive note, I have also heard that Microsoft has paid some attention to the high-end requirements of the machine capable of running XP MCE and have tried to help alleviate some of those harsh constraints.
We have been talking about XP MCE for several months now and have already talked about what will be new in MCE 2005, but now that it has been announced, several people are pointing out the things that are clearly lacking. This article by eHomeUpgrade is a good example that mentions the weirdnesses with HDTV support as well as DVD player reliability, while also giving a list of some of the new features of the OS. On a positive note, I have also heard that Microsoft has paid some attention to the high-end requirements of the machine capable of running XP MCE and have tried to help alleviate some of those harsh constraints.
