Next Vista Media Center leaked -- no DirecTV HD till 2010?

Engadget HD has gotten the latest on the highly anticipated update for Vista Media Center and it doesn't look good. The first release candidate made it into testers hands recently and they weren't happy to see that the most anticipated features -- support for a DirecTV HD tuner and native H.264 support -- got pushed to Windows 7. So head over to Engadget HD for more details (screen shots included).

[Flashpoint @ Jul 5th 2008 5:58PM]

completely underwhelming.

[milton359 @ Jul 5th 2008 6:25PM]

yep another Vista.

[michas_pi @ Jul 5th 2008 5:59PM]

Oh damn, I don't want to wait for h.264 support. :(

[jakem @ Jul 5th 2008 9:22PM]

This is all a bit strange. Earlier today I was looking at a whole lot of screenshots of BBC HD playing in Fiji. BBC HD is broadcast via Freesat and I believe that uses H.264. Microsoft would be silly to drop this because, in addition to not supporting DirectTV in the US, it would mean no support for Freesat in the UK or digital tv in Norway and New Zealand which also use H.264.

I'm hoping that they're either testing DirectTV seperately as Engadget HD suggested or they have simply removed it for the RC0 release while they tinker with the code to bring it back in a later release.

[Neeko @ Jul 6th 2008 10:51AM]

Do a little research people. MKV files do actually play on MCE. Iv been playing them for weeks now. Just gotta add the codec lines to the registry of Vista.

SAve this as a .reg file....

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mkv]
"PerceivedType"="video"
"Content Type"="video/mkv"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Extensions\.mkv]
"Runtime"=dword:00000007
"Permissions"=dword:0000000f
"UserApprovedOwning"="yes"


DONE HAPPY.

[monkfishbandana @ Jul 6th 2008 7:04PM]

@ Neeko

Do we add DONE HAPPY to the end of the .reg file?



I kid...I kid...

[Homeboy @ Jul 5th 2008 6:00PM]

Ich hat ein Crayon.

[Cardbored @ Jul 5th 2008 6:04PM]

Ich habe ein Crayon

[Zaidyn @ Jul 5th 2008 6:55PM]

+1 for Cardbored's own.

[Dillon @ Jul 5th 2008 7:03PM]

Ich shat ein Crayon... into the toilet

[Tis---strange @ Jul 6th 2008 6:39AM]

Ich habe einen Buntstift...
And by the way, Crayon is not a german word at all...

[RC @ Jul 5th 2008 6:10PM]

Balls, I don't care about either. So I guess it's still highly anticipated for me. Direct TV, really? Honestly, what percentage of potential users are we even talking about here? 5%?

[eddie @ Jul 5th 2008 6:10PM]

What makes me saddest about Media Center here in the UK is that for some reason it picks up the BBC Channels from the wrong transmitter, meaning I get the wrong regional news and also obviously terrible reception for the BBC channels. The analogue TV doesn't do it nor does the cheap set top box so why Media Center? :(

[RazorD @ Jul 5th 2008 6:24PM]

It will only use the first version of each channel it finds, so obviously the poor reception is on the lower frequencies.

All you have to do is go into the guide setup and edit channels, it'll have BBC one (at blaMHz) and further down will have one unticked with the same name, but at the higher MHz. Just untick the first one and tick the second one, then edit the order to move it back up to 1, and you'll be fine. :)

[Greg @ Jul 5th 2008 6:10PM]

If that was the lastest release, would the copyrights date be 2008?

[iofthestorm @ Jul 6th 2008 12:55AM]

Not necessarily, it's a dev build so every last bit might not be correct.

[spyder91 @ Jul 6th 2008 1:01AM]

And not say "Longhorn" anymore...

[Isaac @ Jul 5th 2008 6:13PM]

Even though you are a fan boy, I actually agree. I have a vista computer and a apple macbook and I have all my media on my mac because in my experience it is just better. Itunes on mac runs about 400 times faster then it does on vista.

[DefPo3t @ Jul 5th 2008 6:16PM]

i know they both begin with a M but mistaking Mac for MythTv is not acceptable

[DefPo3t @ Jul 5th 2008 6:17PM]

"Back for my fans" My what big ego you have

[PeterF @ Jul 5th 2008 6:27PM]

@Isaac
Apple did that on purpose so people like you think its Windows' fault, but its really Apple's. Also, look at the great setup they made for quicktime + itunes. The thing you downloaded isnt run as admin, and asks 2 or 3 times when it launches sub-setups that run as admin so it bugs you with UAC multiple times instead of just once.

[Good_Bytes @ Jul 5th 2008 6:33PM]

it's probably already done, but people complained that Vista did not have enough features.. so they all these features to the Vista SP2 repackage aka: Windows 7 (a but like what Windows XP was over Windows 2000)

[nerdtalker @ Jul 5th 2008 6:48PM]

Of course iTunes runs faster on Mac than it does on Vista, or any Microsoft OS for that matter; do you honestly think Apple Devs are going to spend the time to optimize their code for Windows platforms?

That's why iTunes grinds doggedly slow doing just about _anything_ on my plenty powerful 3.2 GHz X7800 based notebook. Seriously, I love getting a progress bar everytime I launch the dang thing while it (I kid you not) loads my library. Even better is the chillingly slow saving library progress bar at the end.

It isn't a question of OS X or Windows being faster than the other, other apps have no distinguishable performance difference between the two (CS3), it's a matter of apple building a performance/experience bias into their flagship product. Ridiculious.

[JeffinLA @ Jul 5th 2008 6:51PM]

I would be very happy with ONE additional feature add - A FRIGGEN WAY TO LIST FILES! Just a simple text list, like a directory. Browsing media is just insulting with Vista Media Center. All my stupid icons are black, because the first frame of the video is almost always black. Uugghh.

[jakem @ Jul 5th 2008 8:27PM]

Thumbnails aren't based on the first frame. Windows uses an image from somewhere around the thirty second or so mark. If you're thumbnails are all black it may be due to a conflict with some other software or a codec that you've installed.

I do agree that it would be nice to be able to sort video files in a list.

[Joe H @ Jul 5th 2008 8:33PM]

For most media, it should actually be taking the screenshot from about 15-30 seconds in I think.

Personally, I've used pretty much every media frontend out there, and nothing compares to Vista Media Center, especially since installing MyMovies (www.mymovies.name) and MyTV (mytv.senseitweb.com - the website is currently down there). I was then able to take out the pictures and videos strip, online spotlight strip, and a few other unnecessary icons and its absolutely perfect.

As for built-in QAM support, anyone who cares about this probably bought an HDHomerun anyway, so its not all that big a feature anyway.

[Ben Hobbs @ Aug 20th 2008 7:11AM]

Just use a folder.jpg file then to display whatever picture you want.

[Dillon @ Jul 5th 2008 6:59PM]

Man, if I didn't know that that is German, I would have assumed that whoever wrote that window was trying to be gangsta in English.

[Dillon @ Jul 5th 2008 7:02PM]

That doesn't even make any sense dude. I think you're missing a question mark in there somewhere.

Unless you were trying to make some sort of Haiku I guess... but you screwed that up too ;)

[Echo1 @ Jul 5th 2008 7:04PM]

I don't think the lack of DirectTV support is the only problem with media center; DRM plays an equal part to the equation

[nerdtalker @ Jul 5th 2008 7:33PM]

Yeah, they do. About 80% of the market runs Windows, by last approximation.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=106&qpmr=14&qpdt=1&qpct=0&sample=4

[Galley @ Jul 5th 2008 7:35PM]

Weren't they supposed to have DirecTV support back in Windows 98?

[Travis @ Jul 5th 2008 7:46PM]

I don't think this is real. They speak and write English in Redmond.

[Ruben @ Jul 5th 2008 7:56PM]

I have heard directly from one of the Microsoft media center guys at an energizeIT event that Figi would have MPEG4 capability (hush hush, of course).

So I dont believe this for a second.

[Ben @ Jul 5th 2008 7:58PM]

The previous betas did have support, but RC0 doesn't.

[HalfJoey @ Jul 5th 2008 7:57PM]

Why doesn't DirecTV just add the support? why does Microsoft need to do it?

[W Schindler @ Jul 5th 2008 9:16PM]

I live right near DTV development center. They were trying to find system engineers/testers for a vaporware wireless device. The Project Manager had no idea about technology, so suspect the project is no longer active.

Now they want to sell a device which puts DTV on your laptop? Nonsense, If they followed FCC req's and just permitted bi-directional communication with the HD DVRs they now supply, you could watch shows without another silly device. [The FCC mandated an USB interface, but failed to describe the interface requirements].

Okay, before I am blasted by you all, understand that I am just some dumb engineer who has been doing all of the this for years. That is, I can watch DVT on my laptop without a special box (I do have a server supporting transcoding of virtually all formats) and it cost me almost nothing (actually about $150 for the hardware (used from a previous project)) and could be done for substantially less. In fact, this supports playing on any number of my 1080i/p sets. So folks, why don't they supply a device like I have used for years?

[Sean O @ Jul 5th 2008 11:25PM]

@Schindler
Care to elaborate on how you are doing this? Is there a list of components you could provide? You can call it Schindler's List.

[Nohone @ Jul 5th 2008 8:08PM]

Yep, you are right. Mac with FrontRow and iTunes is a wonderful PVR. I can record all my favorite TV shows in HD and watch them whenever I want. Timeshifting runs like a breeze, in fact, it allows me to fast forward to a point in the TV show that has not even been broadcast yet - just this morning I watched all of Terminator season 2. Using that remote that came with my Mini lets me enter channel numbers with ease (which proves Isaac is a Windows fanboy, it runs infinity times faster than on a Mac, not just 400x). QAM FTL. Macs connect directly into Steve Jobs' brain, and we know that is where all creativity comes from. Plus it runs "Beyond Beyond High Definition", it is completely life like, not just 3D but 4D. It plays games, stores every movie on the internal HDD compressed using that wonderful Apple compression tech that every single movie filmed is stored in just 500 bytes. Unfortunately, I could not afford an Mac Air only a Mini, and now I am stuck with that DVD drive rather than just tapping into the JBN (Jobs Brain Network).



If you are going to advertise for Apple, at least do it the right way.

[Richard Lai @ Jul 5th 2008 8:51PM]

@nerdtalker: Just out of curiosity, does Windows Media Player perform much better than iTunes on your system?

[Isaac @ Jul 5th 2008 9:17PM]

@ Peter

I understand they did it on purpose but it doesn't change the fact that it does run slower on PC.

[Virtuous @ Jul 5th 2008 9:17PM]

Microsoft is in self-destruct mode.

[Virtuous @ Jul 5th 2008 9:53PM]

Media Center must now be full of DRM.

[Mark Anderson @ Jul 6th 2008 4:01AM]

You're going to explain why, aren't you?

[ScottKin @ Aug 20th 2008 7:44AM]

Warning - Virtuous lives under a bridge. Figure it out for yourselves.

[Quikboy @ Jul 5th 2008 9:18PM]

@Richard Lai : I don't know about nerdtalker, but I just tried launching both. I first clicked on iTunes, and then WMP 11.

WMP 11 came up first and worked, at 7.0 seconds.
iTunes came up and worked at 24.0 seconds.

Surprise, surprise. That's why I hate iTunes. WMP 11 seems to do much more things than available in iTunes, looks better, and performs better. iTunes is one of the reasons why I just stopped getting iPods. iTunes is just a mess of a program on Windows.

[JKav @ Jul 5th 2008 10:19PM]

Oh no, no crappy Direct TV.... excuse me I was yawning.... no matter who you are a fan boy is this really a big deal and worth all of the whining?

[Quix @ Jul 6th 2008 12:00AM]

"it's a matter of apple building a performance/experience bias into their flagship product" - nerdtalker

You should try WMP and IE on the Mac. Oh wait, MICROSOFT DOESN'T EVEN SUPPORT THOSE APPS ON MAC ANY LONGER! (And even when they did, they mostly sucked).

A Microsoft fan has no right to denigrate other companies re: performance/experience bias.

Now vote me down, Redmond Horde!

[Jeff Lewis @ Jul 6th 2008 12:22AM]

I'm bewildered by the obsession with CableCard, DirecTV and H.264 myself.

Let's get down to real basics:
- the ability to support more than one tuner
- the ability to support analogue/digital hybrid tuners (hey - Canada doesn't go fully digital until 2011 - and I'm willing to bet 2009 won't be the real switch year for the US either - we've heard that a lot... but from my experiements in the US and Canada, ATSC reception is stunningly poor)
- the ability to support multiple standards at the same time (people do take their laptops when they travel and since as usual the US - and Canada always following along - had to pick a standard not used anywhere else on the planet... the ability to switch easily between analogue, ATSC, DVB-T and Seg1 would be nice.
- improve the ability to use tuners that don't have hardware MPEG-2
- better yet - stop using MPEG-2 as the one true encoder... DiVX, Xvid, generic MPEG-4... all faster and more compatible.

Yes, HD is cool.. but a lot of people are using MCE on laptops and desktop systems directly - so HD is kind of irrelevent.

[loosely_coupled @ Jul 6th 2008 3:48AM]

@Quikboy

iTunes takes over 20 second to load on your computer? Must be a piece of shit.
My basic 1.8ghz Core Duo laptop took 8 seconds.


"WMP 11 seems to do much more things than available in iTunes, looks better, and performs better."

Ha, yeah except that little part about previewing and buying music. Hows that Zune software btw?


"iTunes is just a mess of a program on Windows."
Well, I guess me and the other ~150 million that use it every day must be crazy then...