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Missing remote covers the new highs and lows of Media Center in Windows 7
The Missing Remote spent a few weeks with the new Windows Media Center in Windows 7 and was nice enough to share the experience by posting an overview and a few nice videos. Most of the this has been covered before, but there were a few good tidbits like m2ts container support, which will come in handy for playing Blu-ray rips. The most interesting part though is the list of pain points that were not addressed, like the fact that you still can't record the live TV buffer, no channel logos, and there is still no native Blu-ray support. The author obviously isn't an avid EHD reader or he would've been intimately familiar with the new Cyberlink Blu-ray playback software that was shown at CES. As for our coverage of the new Media Center features in Windows 7, stay tuned.
Video: Windows Media Center 7 with touch interface
Although many of the devout Media Center fans were disappointed with the the Microsoft keynote, Windows Media Center 7 most definitely raises the bar for DVR software. The new guide is really cool and also addresses some of the bigger pain points for MC users. Then, to really dazzle your friends Microsoft has added a touch interface whitch is not only really really cool to play with, it will also be very useful for those with touch screen computers in locations like a kitchen.
Video: Cyberlink's native Media Center Blu-ray player
At this point most aren't happy with Microsoft's progress of adding new features to Windows Media Center, but lucky for Blu-ray fans there are other companies willing to pick up the slack. The first to create Blu-ray software that tried to focus on the Media Center crowd was ArcSoft with its TotalMedia Theater, but although it was better than anything else out there, it is far from seamless. Competition is good and at Microsoft's booth we got to see a demo of the new Cyberlink PowerDVD Media Center player. It was far and away more seamless than the older PowerDVD and although it was very Media Center like, it still wasn't the same -- the most obvious difference is the scrub bar, which looks nothing like the Media Center scrub bar. This is an early version and is far from snappy. You can see in the video there are some pretty long delays when loading the disc, but to be fair it was tested on a netbook. Ultimately we liked it more than TotalMedia Theater, but we still long for native Blu-ray playback.
Samsung MediaLive Digital Media Adapter review
One of the reasons why Microsoft's Media Center is so attractive is because of the extender functionality. It allows you to enjoy just about all the same content in every room of your house, without the need to buy more than one HTPC. But with variety sometimes brings hard choices, so this motivated us to start a quest to find the best Media Center Extender. While the Xbox 360 is the obvious choice for most, it isn't the best solution for everyone. So we started out by comparing it to every extender out there. But since our initial shoot out, a few more Extenders have made their way to market, and the most recent addition is the Samsung MediaLive Media Adapter. At first glance it seems that this is the perfect solution for anyone with a Samsung TV, and while the tight integration, great price, and diminutive size is attractive, you'll have to click though to find out why we're still on the hunt for the perfect Windows Media Center Extender. %Gallery-38727%
Windows 7 includes a driver for the DirecTV HDCP-20 USB tuner
We all have our hopes up that the elusive DirecTV HDPC-20 dual HD USB tuner for Windows Media Center will have support in Windows 7, but after three years of it being vaporware, we have our doubts. Things are looking up however as our friend Ed Bott found the little gem pictured above in the pre-beta version of Windows 7. This is easily convincing enough to make us confident that by next Christmas, we'll be able to finally enjoy H.264 encoded HD from DirecTV on Windows Media Center. And no, we don't expect this to be OEM only like ATI CableCARD tuners and if we were to guess, we'd say it'd cost about $200, but that's all speculation.
Windows 7 to natively support DivX and transcoding?
Currently getting 3rd party codecs like DivX and Xvid working within Windows Media Center has worked well enough with 3rd party solutions, but the next best thing is native support. We'd already gotten the official word that H.264 support was included in Windows 7, but a tipster has lead us to believe that the pre-beta version of Windows 7 also includes native support for DivX. In addition, MKV is also expected to be supported; but that isn't the best part. Because although we've always been able to add these codecs to Media Center anyways, the real crux has been when you try to watch the very same content on an extender -- like the Xbox 360. So in an attempt to bring the entire Media Center experience to the extenders it appears Microsoft has added native transcoding. So now if Media Center can play the file, it can also convert it on the fly to a format that your extender supports. Of course like all betas, there's no guarantee these features will make it into the final build, but we sure hope they do.
