Vista Media Centre is junk – Is this Alpha code?

A while ago due to a combination of circumstances I decided to build a Windows Media Centre PC. A few friends had them and spoke highly and being stuck on an island it seemed like a bright idea to pass the time between dives, fishing and drinking. I started, but never had the time to get it completed.

Then I moved back to Oz and it got put in a box for 12 months.

I recently resurrected the project and decided to fire the thing up with Vista. This is the story of woe that followed.

OS Installation

Well, one would think that for a system designed to live in the lounge room displaying on your huge energy sucking plasma TV using a flash as wireless keyboard then you could install it as such. Fat chance. Installation pretty well requires you to plug in a normal USB keyboard, mouse and often LCD PC screen into something that is not supposed to need a keyboard, mouse and screen. DUMB

My disk had been used for XP. As I alluded to here, you can’t install Vista onto a Dynamic Disk with a partition on it. Pull apart your PC and play the HDD shuffle to fix this moronic decision. I haven’t had to do this since I chipped my first XBox. DUMB

Drivers & Hardware

Next step was to get the drivers to work. Scarily enough all the Hardware was over one whole year old, so I figured my chances were limited, seeing as it was released before Vista. Most manufacturers have a “don’t look back” policy. (If you think large company means better driver support – HP, Sony, Dell, IBN etc – you are kidding yourself, they are worse). I spent a significant number of hours throwing ideas round the XPMediaCentre website with little to no success.

Tuner
Dvico Dual Digital TV Tuner Card – Hours (many hours) wasted, drivers give combinations of “unknown devices”, single tuner only, or dual tuners with non visible to Media Centre. Nightmare stuff.
I replaced it with a Dual Digital Hauppauge to much greater success.

Video Card
I was recommended a HIS X1300 as it had the fanless option I was after. It’s up to the task, but the drivers are rubbish. They don’t have all the options covered on the ATI site. Support for varied resolutions or dual screen doesn’t exist. You can’t drive the VGA and Component outputs at the same time.

It’s impossible to get a colour signal through the component output to the TV. The TV is a native 1366 x 768 wide picture. The best the card will deliver is B&W at 480i. There is no option in the HIS driver to setup the component outputs. The ATI driver doesn’t work with the card. I would like to video switch with my amp, and component will give the best quality to do that. I ended up driving the screen with VGA @ 1360 x 768.

Comments on the boards abound about Video output, quality and alignment issues. The justifications given are basically that TV and PC signals are fundamentally incompatible and can’t work well together. I have an XBox that says that is rubbish. It should be very possible to get good TV support from cards with TV outputs, anything less is a sign of immaturity in the industry. VGA is analogue, TV is analogue. DVI is digital, HDMI is digital. Either way, a good signal at any resolution should be simple.

Case
The Zalman HD 160 looked good and had an excellent layout internally for quiet airflow. Unfortunately the drivers for it were a mess.

The card reader comes up an an Unknown USB device.

The IR receiver reception is poor and only works when the software is running.

The software doesn’t autorun, so you have to do that after install. It may also may stop receiving IR when the machine goes to sleep.

The display on the front does work when the IR software is running, however if you then use the MS IR receiver as it gets a MUCH  better signal, the two conflict. It is supposed to be possible to turn the built in one off, but I can’t figure out the software options. I gave up and ignored the display.

IR Keyboard
The Microsoft IR Keyboard is rubbish. Total and utter rubbish. There is a 70% chance that the key you press will end up on the screen. As it’s impossible to touch type on your lap, you have to look up and down after typing each key to see if it worked. This becomes frustrating after about the first 3 keys, before I gave up and plugged in a USB keyboard to work off. IR works, it doesn’t have to be that bad. JUNK

Lockups
These aren’t resolved yet, but I suspect the Asus MB. I’ll update when it’s solved.

Audio Out
The digital audio out seems to work OK, although my distrust by now extends fairly wide, so I would really like to see some sort of display to tell me if it’s decided to output Stereo vs 5.1.

Software

Codecs
Amazingly enough Microsoft bothered to include the codec to play DVD’s, I suppose MCE 2005 didn’t even get that. Unfortunately not being able to play Quicktime, DivX or XVid rules out a good 50% of the content out there. The codecs for these can be problematic, especially with AC3 audio. Quicktime is still giving me grief.

Lets get this straight, my chipped Xbox with XBox media centre written by a bunch of hackers worried about prosecution played more stuff, more reliably than Microsoft multi million dollar effort. That’s a JOKE.

Codecs and Media Centre
OK, so I have the Codecs installed and can play the video through Media Player. But not through MCE. It still doesn’t recognise stuff. So I still can’t play Quicktime through MCE. Great effort. You write Office for the Mac, but you can’t licence Quicktime. Marketing Morons.

Screensaver
I worry about burn in on my Plasma. It seems pretty simple to me. If a movie or TV is playing, don’t let the screen saver run. If a movie is paused or not playing fulls screen, make sure it’s enabled by default and kicks in after 5 minutes. Simple. Of course it doesn’t work that way. When it will kick in seems to be dependent on it’s mood, what erroneous input the IR receiver has seen or a set of undocumented rules, it may, or may not come on.

Guide
It’s crap in Australia. Enough said. If I pay for ICE TV it may work better than what Microsoft should have sorted out years ago. I mean they have enough experience in court, what’s another court case.

Library
You can only add shares to the Library, not individual sub-folders. What year are we in? They sorted that for Home Drive mapping back in Windows 2000!

Aspect Ratio
I suspect this is more to do with the huge range of aspect ratios and how they are recorded onto DVD, but after owning a wide-screen TV, it really is a dogs breakfast and all over the place. I frequently find myself trying different screen formats to see what fits best. Immature industry this wide-screen HDTV.

Summary

Well the driver support is poor. The hardware is poor. The Microsoft components are not well integrated. The codecs are non-existent. The setup is a nightmare. And they expect this to replace my mothers VCR one day?

Lets get this straight. The ONLY thing Vista MCE does that a chipped XBox running XBox Media Centre can’t is record TV. The old cheap simple reliable modded XBox does more than Media Centre, with less hassle. And you can buy HDD recorders for recording TV.

I would think twice and then think again before I set my heart on this rubbish. I’ll persist and get it working, but this is definitely v0.02.