Windows 7 mediacenter: first impressions

[VJ]

Hello,

Finally managed to fully configure my media center pc at home. I'm running Windows 7 beta, and lack an internet connection on that machine at this time.

Everything seems to work fine, it even seems to be able to use hybrid tuners (Compro E900f). I do understand the annoyances people have with Windows Mediacenter, I would have expected more features etc.

Some things I'd like to see changed are:

• recordings result in a .wtv file; would like to see something more standard
• tunercard has hardware mpeg4 support, but I cannot choose compression settings (just general quality), would like more freedom
• some picture in picture feature would be interesting (given that there are two tuners)

I will try other MediaCenter softwares (have downloaded MediaPortal, will give this a go next weekend).

[Paddy]

Let me know how you get on! I am using WMC in windows7 and find it buggy to say the least. I dont have a tunercard, but like the central access for audio/vid/pics for the wife and kids....

[VJ]

I must say I haven't encountered many bugs... It dares show some strange behaviour when it doesn't have an internet connection and you ask for the list of movies (presumably because it tries to fetch data from the net).

For recordings in the "movies" section, it doesn't show a thumbnail (which is a bit sad), but other than that, I'm very pleased with it...

[Paddy]

I have to ctrl-alt-del to 'end task' every now and then - it also crashes whenever i connect my pda to the pc - it pops up a box asking me if i want to sync, but there is no way of either selecting the box, or backing out of it...

[VJ]

Ha, ok...
I'm only using it as a media center though, not much other software is currently installed (it still is connected to a CRT TV, making it less useful for things other than video playback. My main intentions for this machine was mediacenter and gaming, but the latter part hasn't really happenend yet...

edit: forgot to mention that I have re-installed it with the RC version.