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
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Music
There are other shortcut menus as well, highlight My Music and your most recently played music will appear to the right of the menu:
These tweaks as well as minor interface tweaks throughout Media Center definitely provide an even more polished experience than before. If Media Center was incredibly quick and easy to navigate before, Microsoft has made it even quicker and easier.
Media Center's My Music is basically a nice front end for your Windows Media Library, but given that Windows Media Player 10 is far from what we'd call a good UI this front end is a pleasure to work with.
In the past there have been complaints that the performance of searching through large music libraries is basically irritatingly slow in Media Center. The performance has been improved somewhat in MCE 2005 but searching is hardly lightening fast for extremely large music collections.
With only a 3GB of MP3s in our test collection, navigating and searching for music in Media Center was extremely quick, however once you start to get much larger than that things to tend to slow down when it comes to searching for music.
Media Center once again will download album information and album arts off the net in an attempt to complete your collection and make it as pretty looking as possible. This is very similar to what we recently saw with the Portable Media Center interface, so it's no surprise to see it echoed here.
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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.