Niggle
I used to run my own software on WOPR, but with Mark 2 I want it to replace my TiVo and my Freeview box as well as be a video server, so my original plan was to run MythTV on Linux. After reading up on it, it sounded great. So many features, from the recording of TV, to the weather forecasts and RSS support, to the downloading of meta-data of all the films from IMDB. But the more I read about it and the more I read about what hardware it would work with and how to make each section run correctly, I realised that I needed to do an awful lot of research. And if I was having to do that much research on how to make it work properly, perhaps it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
So I switched tracks, added an extra £80 onto my costs, and purchased Windows XP Media Center edition instead. And so far, I’m very pleased with it. Setup was a breeze, it detected my two tuner cards without any fuss, scanned the channels and put them all in the correct order. The interface is very smooth and I have a nice light-up official Media Center remote to go with it which brings a smile to my face every time I press a button. There’s been serious thought put into how users are going to interact with it, and searching through the guide for programmes to record or watching live TV is all very easy to do, better even than the TiVo it replaces.
My only niggle so far is in it’s handling of video. It’s designed around people having camcorder footage they want to display, rather than for those who have ripped their DVD collection. This means that there is no search, no way to show the collective contents of multiple hard disks (I have four), not even a list view - it’s always displayed as nine thumbnails per page. Looking at the version to be released with Vista, it doesn’t look although it’s going to improve any either. There are alternative media center solutions for Windows out there, but I don’t believe any of them are going to handle the TV experience quite so well, so for now I’m just going to have to stick with it.
