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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The Final Test
The only way Microsoft can justify the price of a Media Center PC is by offering it as a multipurpose machine, as a Media Center PC as well as your regular family, office, gaming or whatever-else-you-do-with-it PC. The problem with this scenario is, as we just established, that Media Center takes up quite a bit of horsepower when you're using it as intended. So how usable are these machines as multitaskers between recording TV shows and doing everything else you do with your PC?
Anytime you switch between the Media Center interface and the XP interface, the entire system pauses - video, audio, everything. The pause is annoying and will sometimes interrupt whatever it is you may be recording; this pause is present regardless of how fast or how slow your CPU is; it will occur when going from a full screen Media Center interface to a windowed one, or when simply minimizing the Media Center interface.
Luckily for Microsoft, most users don't run through the program guide while typing in Word or watch TV while they're gaming. Most of the time the Media Center interface will actually be closed while the user is doing something else with their PC. Microsoft understood this and thus allowed Media Center to continue to record scheduled shows even while the interface was inactive. Which leads us to our next question, how much overhead is there when the Media Center interface isn't running, but the system is still recording a show?
When you're just watching TV on a MCE box, quite a bit is happening on the inside, keeping your entire system busier than most people probably ever tax their machines. The video present on your screen is being encoded and decoded in real time in front of you, which is the cause for most of the high CPU utilization that you get when just "watching TV." But if you aren't watching the TV, just recording what's on a particular channel, then you're only encoding the data that comes into the TV tuner, there's no decoding done - so less of your CPU is used. How much less? Quite a bit.
While our fastest platform had about 21% of its CPU power in use while watching TV, only 6.5% of its time was used when simply recording a show in the background. While that's more CPU power than playing an MP3, it still leaves quite a bit for you to complete other tasks. Even the mid-range configurations only had about 10% of their CPU power tied up, leaving the system very free to do many other things.
There is one limitation to keep in mind here however. While we see that recording a single show without displaying it on the screen at the same time does not require much CPU power, thanks to the hardware-assisted encoding of ATI's eHome Wonder card, don't forget that all of this recording is giving your hard drive a good workout. We tried launching MS Paint while recording just a single show, and a normal instantaneous program startup was instead replaced with a 5 second program startup, all thanks to the single hard drive in our test bed. The way around this problem is to have a second drive, and to have Media Center record all of its programming to a hard drive separate from the one the rest of your applications are on.; this is a necessity if you plan on using your MCE machine as a regular PC while it goes about its Media Center duties. Through the recorder settings you can tell Media Center to store its buffer and recorded shows on a separate hard drive; problem solved.
Next we wanted to see how much of an increase in CPU utilization there was by recording two shows simultaneously, once again, outside of the Media Center interface.
Here we see that the performance hit isn't too bad until we get much slower than 1.6GHz, but even then it's not horrible.
With over 80% of your CPU going unused, that's plenty of horsepower to work on documents, surf the web and even play a few games. With the right processor, MCE 2005 can definitely be used as the all purpose PC that Microsoft wants it to be. The thing to keep in mind is that the stability of the system will definitely be pushed to the limits; running MCE has shown us that poorly written drivers, overly aggressive memory timings and general hardware instability definitely won't cut it under this type of load.
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martydee - Sunday, February 6, 2005 - link
Does anyone know if a PVR card with a hardware DVD DECODER (such as the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 350) is compatible with Windows MCE? And would a hardware decoder give any real benefits to the system over the software equivilent (i.e. nVidia DVD decoder)?louisb - Thursday, January 13, 2005 - link
mulminute - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
My biggest use is sending music and photos to entertainment center,. Should I use MC 2004 or wait for 2005mulminute - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
My biggest use is sending music and photos to entertainment center,. Should I use MC 2004 or wait for 2005CZroe - Sunday, October 17, 2004 - link
"Windows MCE will never be any use for people serious about video until it allows you to select what codecs you want to use for encoding from all the DirectShow codecs installed on your system. Having to use the proprietary MS stuff with all their DRM garbage is unsuitable."You're clearly one seriously misinformed individual. MCE isn't an interface to multiple video formats and types and simply wonld not function correctly if it were.
Understand this: An MCE PC has one or more TV tuners and video capture cards in it and they will function exactly like any other PC with that hardware. If you want to record in the format of your choice with an XP MCE PC, no one is stopping you. Fire up your application of choice, select your codec and complain to the software maker that they don't have their own integrated EPG and automatic scheduling capabilities. Honestly, how would you expect EVERY format to support embedded CC and on the fly sequence removal? How could you expect hardware encoding support for any directshow enabled codec? You can't just throw a pre-encoded MPEG2 stream from the hardware into any encoder and expect real time results.
glennpratt - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Definately go to www.thegreenbutton.com/community I'm in the US so I don't know much about getting EPG and what not in Australia, but there are a bunch of people from around the world there. The first page load is excruciatingly slow on the site, but once you on its OK.tantryl - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Quick question that again I haven't seen addressed that much. On the Best/Better etc. quailty settings, what is the average MB/hour ratio?How many hours could you store on your average 200GB (191 real GB)?
tantryl - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Thanks glenn.I'm in Australia so TiVo or the like is not currently an option (although I've heard rumours it'll be here within another year). The main problem with it is the program guide.
Australia is officially supported by MCE2005, and I'm very interested in just what that means. So far it looks like no Australia specific music or movie internet services are supported, but I can't find anything to say definately either way. I'm so desperate I'm even considering ringing up Microsoft and going through the quagmire that is customer relations there. But the good thing is, I'm fairly certain (although again, not seen it in writing yet) that the program guide system will work. We only have 5 free-to-air channels and a couple of pay-tv subscription services (that are really the same service packaged differently) so it shouldn't be too hard for them to keep up to date.
Looking at the performance I'm not seeing a hugley compelling reason to go any higher than a Sempron 3100+ although that might be something that would change once I actually get my hands on it and experience it.
Hmmmm. All interesting stuff.
glennpratt - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link
jamawass - There is an IR blaster connected to the remote USB reciever. There are two ports on it, but the old remote only came with one blaster, the new one which is actually cheaper then the old one comes with two.http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?desc...
If you have one you'll understand (or a linux based competitor). The flexibility is awesome (just think about it, it's a whole computer. Not only do you have all the flexibilty advanteges of MCE, you have a full blown OS underneath) compared to a Tivo. It's also MUCH MUCH faster then a Tivo.
As for stability, it all depends on the computer you build it on. You can't tell it's a PC if all you have is the remote. Mine has run for nearly a year, nonstop. You can even put it in S3 (Suspend to ram) and it will still wake up and record when it has to, just like Tivo.
Really, HTPC serves a very different market then Tivo. It has a million more uses then Tivo + DVD Recorder.
For me I have an old high end CRT data projector in my living room, and the cheapest thing I could connect to it when I first got it was a computer. Haven't looked back, even as transcoders have gotten much better and cheaper.
jamawass - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link
How does mce control digital cable boxes for scheduled recordings? Does the remote have a built in IR blaster?