Chris Lanier's Blog

Takes 10 months for this? Pretty sad. Essentially nothing new.

No Listing for Australia I see??

Oh wow. um... thanks for very, very little Microsoft. This is really depressing. Looks like another year before MCE will be back in contention as a useful / retailable solution for customers looking for a decent integrated media centre experience.
It's hard enough explaining to a customer why they should fork out on an expensive PC based system, needing extrea $ for passive cooling, average integration with speaker systems and OS updates every few weeks ... when they can get an installer to wire up a home theatre setup with STB and PVR for less $... and they never get a random reboot or blue screen of death.
Then we have a few months of carrot dangling about Emerald from MS and... even when it's released it's still going to be a month before it's going to be available to existing (early adopter) clients who are the very people MS should be bending over backwards to keep happy and spreading the good word
Little wonder than the mainstream computing press (and smart home press) are less than impressed with MCE.
I run it at home so I've got a demo system for curious clients (I'm not an OEM for MCE but provide consultancy for all aspects of cross media integration - I have a friendly OEM who does the builds for me) and family approval is very important... and frankly it's hard to convince them that it's a good thing when it behaves erratically, or the interface isn't smart enough

That really sucks - not even QAM support. Guess they have to save the good stuff for Vista.

"No QAM"

shucks... *kicks small rocks* dissapointed =(

My thought is they were probably spending a lot of time working on features like cable card, but couldn't get content owners and the like bought in on the protection so it was dropped. It also probably caused them to not implement other features as they were working on cable card.

Well, hopefully they can leverage all the development work that didn't make it into the final release and add a lot of new features into Vista.

Lame... No QAM? Come on.

Why in the hell did they even bother. From what I see of the screen shots the Vista version of media center is going to suck. I'm so disappointed. I really do like MCE - while it's got some issues it's a pretty good product. They just need to add some features and functionality and it could be excellent. I was hoping MCE would be my final HTPC front end but I may have to look around for other alternatives.

No fix to the DVB-T issue in the UK where the EPG listings get lost whenever a new channel is added or name changed. That has caused me to lose countless programs. Real shame, because i'll now have to start looking at other solutions.

3.5SE: From a few beta screenshots of basic features I'm not exactly sure how you can tell it's going to "suck", could you explain your theory here?

Will this rollup fix the MCE remote incompatibility with the new Directv H10 receiver?

I see South Africa is finally getting MCE. Will this include EPG listings?

It is great that it has enabled Xbox 360 support, but unfortunately Microsoft SA hasnt bothered to release the Xbox here, so i am not holding any hope of Xbox 360 being available here either...

This is killing me. I've been waiting for cablecard FOREVER!!! So dissapointing that they left this out.

Dammit Microsoft. Why are they wasting ad money on this product when the retailers trying to push this stuff can't even tell people it can do HD Cable Card support. Who would want this product when they can get better programs for free. Redmond flops again.