Simon May has an interesting poll up: What do you want to do in Media Center but can’t? We all have things we want Media Center to do that it can’t but if you could pick one thing what would it be? I would like to see shared tuners and I know lots of people want better codec support, so have your say on the poll
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I think Picture In Picture / Picture And Picture capability are important to sports fans and for MCE to compete with DVRs.
One thing I have always thought MCE lacked is a simple TV signal strength meter. repostioning aerials is a lot easier when you know the signal strength.
I would like to see Hulu and other web based services in MCE.
QAM.
Ability to assign specific tuners to specific shceduled shows.
Better organization of the front menu. Vista was a step backward from XPMC.
I think there are a few things missing in MCE, here a few things I would like to see:
The ability to tag aTV SHOW for WATCHING without recording, just like most digi boxes do.
Hi Quality VIZ’s like the X-BOX 360 has, I even bought G-force but it doesnt work peoprly in MCE.
Abilty to play MORE file formats using standard windows codecs.
PIP (as mentioned above)
True picture scaling, so if you zoom to widescreen, it records in widescreen.
I’m sure there are more things, but cant think of em right now
I’m pretty disappointed in the recording reliability of my Vista Media Center and ATI Digital Cable Tuner OCUR combination; many recordings fail. My wish would be that MS and AMD get the current feature set working as it should be….
Capture and record digital cable or satellite without having to buy an OEM PC. Whether it’s HD-PVR support, CableCARD support for DIYers, or whatever.
Xbox Marketplace access, Zune integration, ability to send shows to Zune, ipod etc. from the MC interface, Netflix HD Streaming, Hulu integration, ability to burn shows to AVCHD & Blu-Ray.
On my Sky HD box I can copy recordings, this then plays back on the S Video so you can connect a DVD recorder and press record. I’d like to be able to use media center to capture that stream, let me give it a name, and save it in to my recordings directory. I also wish to capture video from my old VCR and camcorder and it would be good if it could do that too.
*** Multi-zone audio (and video)
– Zune (including ZunePass) integration
– Hulu integration
– DIY CableCard
Sorry late to add, but wanted to add my 2 cents:
– Zune Integration
– native Neflix support at least like the 360, but hope for HD streaming
– Hulu support with 10 foot UI and while you are at it add ABC, NBC, CBS streaming support too. I am willing to see an add if I can watch HD shows via media center rather than starting up my browser window and performing a series of mouse movements&clicks just to watch a show. The MC UX is well suited for this.
– YouTube/ Soapbox support
– Sirius and XM support now that they are merged.
-DVD upconverting still only does 480p, shame that other DVD player software can MC should be able to do it as well.
– DVD and BluRay streaming via extenders and native support for BD-Live.
– Ability to control/see whats playing audio/video zones in house via extenders or other third party products like Sonos.
-Ability to customize the Home/Start screen – put up RSS feeds, webcam, weather, IM integration-friends online XBox, Zune, messenger count,email count, etc.
-Ability to cache Album and Movie images locally and then look for changes if any, rather than updating everytime a menu is brought up.
-Better integration with HomeServer or make a SKU that integrates both (HS and MC) for a dedicate Home PC that is easily expandable and can also share files, media, as well as perform backups of other PCs. It’s a no brainer.
– Hardware that can wake and sleep instantly conserving power, while having no noise, take advantage of SSD and Flash for OS and basic functionality for faster response.
– Basic Internet Browser for MC front-end
– How about direct support for integration with Cableboxes and Satellite boxes? Don’t they all have USB ports now?
Native Blu-ray player, including library for BD stored on hard drives.
Concurrent audio outputs, digital and analog at the same time for installations with a home theatre having 5.1 sound and another area that is just stereo.
Satellite TV! Direct and/or Dish
Support for dvb-t2 freeview hd broadcasts, although I guess that’s with the tv card makers?
What about support for the digital text services that come with freeview etc.. being about to sync the BDS EPG data and the more up-to-date brodacast EPG data would be useful.
I do find MCE gives up on recordings very quickly. If the tuners a bit slow it won’t bother retrying. Would like a best efforts mode where it’ll retry 3 times or even record a show a bit late (up to 10 mins?) in case of overlaps.
Also find the episode support for series recordings a bit hit & miss. Most likely down to the mismatch between the US designed system and the UK (or whatever) EPG data. Would be handy for each episode to to uniquely identified so I don’t end up with lots of duplicates and constantly knocking out episodes from my schedule. Worse in the UK due to the +1 channels, episodes digital & terrestrial episodes being offset by 1 week and frequent repeats on digital channels. Even better would be if a recordings missed it’ll automatically reschedule a recording of a repeat – of the right episode.
Actually a lot of this is down to the EPG, would like means to enrich the default EPG data via external sources. Get review figures for films from rotten tomataos, imdb or tv show episode details from tv.com etc..