Digital Home Thoughts: Windows 7 Media Center vs Tivo Premier

"Our perspective of success is based on the user interface experience, so while we previously reviewed both the TiVo Premiere and Windows 7 Media Center, we wanted to also tackle the task of directly comparing the two. Of course there are some obvious differences that might sway someone in one way or another, like TiVo's simpler out of the box setup or Media Center's 3rd party plug-in architecture, there are many other points of distinction to discover if you click on through and read about the less obvious user interface differences as well as a few other baked-in non-DVR features."

Engadget has an in-depth look at the latest Tivo Premier UI and Microsoft's Windows 7 Media Center. Both are deemed to be good products. The Tivo allows a better out-of-the-box experience (especially for non-techies), and Media Center is in general much more powerful and tweakable at the expense of simplicity. I have always been tempted to try to set up a Media Center PC, but the complexity and cost have been a little prohibitive. Also, for all its faults my Comcast DVR is included in my cable package and good enough for 98% of the stuff that I would like to do. The Media Center extender idea is nice, but at this point you really need to buy an Xbox360 to get this feature. I certainly don't see my wife buying into putting a video game system in the bedroom to get rid of a DVR which she can use without any problems. As a gadget junkie, I am willing to be talked into a Media Center if someone can give me a compelling reason!