Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: Feature and Performance Investigation
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 12, 2004 12:19 PM EST- Posted in
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Media Centers Everywhere with Media Center Extenders
With MCE 2005 Microsoft is also announcing two new MCE related devices: Media Center Extenders and Xbox Extenders.
The idea of a Media Center Extender is to be able to have your MCE PC in one room and watch TV, video and other content stored on it in another room, wirelessly or using your home LAN. All of those speeches about digital convergence and the future of the PC are finally upon us, Microsoft is transforming Media Center PCs into true media servers.
In November Microsoft will also be introducing another type of Media Center Extender, but this time it won't be a standalone unit, rather it will be software for the Xbox. For $79.99 MCE 2005 users will be able to use their Xbox as a Media Center Extender to make any TV in the house MCE-enabled. The Media Center Extender for Xbox package will most likely be a much cheaper version of the Media Center Extender since the hardware is already purchased in the Xbox.
Obviously the idea of Media Center Extenders works perfectly with MCE 2005's support for multiple tuners, since people in different rooms will want to watch different channels - something only made possible with multiple tuners. Take this techy dream even further and you can see how supporting only 3 tuners is a limitation, but then again our hardware isn't quite ready for that yet. The push for multicore CPUs should make a lot more sense now for the home PC; music to AMD and Intel's ears.
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glennpratt - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
^ I thought the same thing... How could they have possibly thought that was a good idea?ViRGE - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
Ok, you know the world has gone downhill when even MS is throwing in one of those dancers...glennpratt - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
Yes it works with set top boxes, using an IR Blaster. Though my remote box only has ports for two IR Blasters... I guess having 3 set top boxes attached to the same computer would be overkill. I wonder if it supports 3 different sources like digital cable + DirecTV + OTA HD. That would be sweet. I may have to try that out if I ever get my grubby hands on 2005.haci - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
It looks like BeyondTV can handle 6 tuners just fine:http://www.snapstream.com/community/articles/medus...
It would be interesting to see how the CPU requirements under BeyonTV and Windows MCE compare while using hardware encoders.
I would have expected the requirements to be similar, since most of the work is done by the encoder card anyway, but the MCE review seems to imply high CPU utilization under MCE.
Would it be possible to do some sort of comparison?
louisb - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
Will this work with a digital cable set-top box? Or is there a tuner card thats works with digital cable?Cygni - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
On page 13: "The movies on demand features are provided by three companies: , and . "Man, thats the same company three times! They are dominating! heh.
The multituner support is a big step forward, and i cant believe how polished everything seems to be. My current rig doesnt have the unf (or the right tuners) to get into the MCE game just yet, but it certainly looks very appealing now.