Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: Feature and Performance Investigation

HDTV Support

Microsoft has taken a lot of flack on this next point, and that is the support for only OTA (over the air) HDTV broadcasts. This means that the only HDTV channels MCE 2005 will support are those you can get over a HDTV antenna, not channels like HBO HD and Discovery HD. There are sensitive issues regarding content protection that pushed Microsoft in the direction of being as safe as possible with HDTV support for MCE 2005; unfortunately this is one area where Media Center truly falls behind to set-top PVRs like the new HD enabled Tivos.

In the end, with Media Center targeted at the mass consumer market, most people aren't viewing broadcasts in HD so it's not a huge loss for Microsoft, yet. We will have to wait and see how this situation plays out in the future, as it will most definitely adjust Microsoft's course of action with regards to Media Center. Needless to say, Microsoft's safe-route with MCE 2005 has pretty much sealed the verdict as to whether or not Microsoft was going to be the champion of bringing recordable HD content to the masses.

Politics and lawsuits aside, how does MCE 2005 work with OTA HDTV broadcasts? We would love to tell you, but we can't. Although ATI's HDTV Wonder is the only HD tuner supported by MCE 2005 at this time, support for HDTV isn't built into the shipping OS. Instead, there will be a patch made available after the publication of this article, that enables HDTV support but we could not get the patch from Microsoft before the publication of this article.

We will provide updated information as soon as we can get ATI's HDTV Wonder working in a quick follow-up article.

There are a few requirements that we need to spell out for OTA HDTV to work. For starters, you need at least one analog TV tuner in the MCE system, meaning that you can have at most 2 HDTV tuners it would seem. Secondly, ATI's HDTV Wonder does not feature a hardware MPEG-2 encoder, meaning that it cannot be used as both your analog and HDTV tuner, so you'll have to either wait for another card to be supported or you'll have to deal with the fact that getting OTA HDTV support will require two cards. While we haven't had a chance to test it ourselves, HDTV playback under Media Center is supposedly pretty taxing on your system and on your graphics card. We've been told that a minimum of a 128-bit graphics memory bus is necessary, but will we confirm that as soon as possible.

In the end, it's tough to list HDTV support as a feature of MCE 2005. There are far too many limitations for it to be considered a full fledged feature; but it being a "2005" edition would seemingly dictate that it at least needs to have some support for HDTV to save face among the user base.