Thomas Hawk has an interesting analysis of how Windows Media Centrer Edition is doing today. In Media Center PCs So Far Not In Starring Role, he points to a Reuters article and writes:
There are two major problems that I see with Media Center Edition as it stands now.
- The decision that was made NOT to aggressively pursue HDTV capabilty early in the process and still eludes the product today while satellite and cable providers are aggressively offering HDTV DVR products and even getting into the business of marketing HDTVs directly.
- The fact that as it currently stands, Media Center Edition demos horribly in my home due to the extremely slow performance of “my music”. As a hopeful evangelist for the product every person that I show the system to in my home, and there have been many, are put off by the long wait times associated with playing music on the system.
Until these shortcomings are addressed, I agree with the article that Media Center will not see widespread adoption.
I have more than 12,000 songs on my Media Center PC and do not see any of these performance problems, as I posted several weeks ago.
I’d be interested in doing some tests to see what the nature of Thomas’s issue is. But perhaps one reason Microsoft doesn’t appear to be addressing this as an issue is that it is hardware or format-specific.
As for HDTV, I agree with Thomas that this is a stumbling block for adoption of MCE. After all, the same early adopters who are drawn to Media Center are also going to lust after HDTV performance and resolution. But the cable and satellite companies really hold all the cards on this issue. If I want anything other than over-the-air HD, I have to use a PVR from my cable company or buy DirecTV with Tivo. There is no other way to get the HD signal from the cable box or satellite decoder to a third-party PVR. And that’s the way the cable and satellite companies want it, because it means they have lock-in.
As it stands, I now have four choices for my living room:
- HD-PVR from my cable company (inadeuate storage space and terrible software)
- Media Center (wonderful with music and pictures but expensive and only does over-the-air HDTV)
- TiVo (awesome interface but doesn’t do HDTV at all)
- DirecTV with Tivo (very expensive to buy, and much more expensive than cable for me).
So which set of compromises do I make?
Update: Thomas adds some great comments below. He also has some more performance-related questions about Windows Media Player here.
Is anyone from the WMP team reading this? Scoble? Matt Goyer? (I’d link to you, Matt, but your blog is broken…) Anyone?
Ed Bott 
12,000 songs is nothing. Try running 141,000 songs or even a mere 50,000 songs through MCE and watch what happens. Microsoft needs to be ahead of the curve on this, especially since the answer is as simple as having an indexing option built into Windows Media Player (the real underlying culprit).
Although certain things like playlists and some genres are almost bearable, the listing of a music collection by song, artist, and the search capability are essentially worthless.
My point is that, even forget about the blog for a second, instead of having a huge evangelist for the product showing everyone who comes to my home an amazing piece of software, instead everyone who visits my house (and the number is large) gets to see how slow the interface is irrespective of the actual size of their own personal mp3 library. This leaves a negative impression of the product despite my excitement over it when I show it to them. The word of mouth, personal blog buzz, showing the unit off to your family, friends and neighbors, etc. are all essential to generating interest and excitement regarding the product.
I own the HDTV TiVo and despite the cost, it is simply fantastic. I should receive a commission check from DirecTV as I’ve had many friends buy a unit after watching me demo mine. With 4 tuners, 250 gig drive, etc. etc. the unit is a triumph for home media. Once again I couldn’t believe how beautiful CSI Miami looked last night (the episode from 3 weeks ago that I’m just getting to now). This unit is less expensive than the MCE machine. The cable companies, while bad today, are quickly improving their offerings as evidenced by the latest box that Comcast is testing in Washington (by Microsoft no less). With the cable companies on the low end and the high end TiVo satellite on the high end MCE really has not found a suitable home yet for mass market or high end adoption.
And if little old TiVo could figure out a way to play ball with the media companies and come out with a first rate HDTV recorder certainly Microsoft with all of their money and clout could as well. Weren’t they the ones that invented DRM? But, alas, most likely too little too late.
Well, 12,000 songs may be “nothing” to you, but I bet it puts me in the 98th percentile or higher when it comes to American media consumers, and you’re in the 99.9 percentile for sure with that media collection. Anyway, your earlier post mentioned 5,000 songs, which is not in keeping with my experience.
I agree that Media Library would benefit from indexing, but that is not even close to the reason for the lack of adoption, and if you were to survey Media Center owners I suspect that none would mention music search performance as an issue.
As for Tivo and DirecTV, I think that was a fluke of the market several years ago. It’s no accident that DirecTV has announced plans to break the relationship with Tivo in about two years and introduce its own PVR solution. I’m certain that Microsoft has been in intense discussions with cable companies about this issue, but no one’s biting. They want the lock-in.
Maybe when cable cards come out, there’ll be another opportunity.
The point is that all music libraries, both large and small could benefit from indexing. While my wait my be 4 minutes to get music going, even with a smaller library a user could benefit from having a 10 second wait converted to 2.
It would be one thing if it were a technical impossibility to improve speed or an expensive proposition. The fact of the matter is that all of our media libraries are only getting larger and an easy and inexpensive way to do this is available today by indexing the WMP library. Quite simple actually. I’m not sure why there is so much resistance in Redmond over improving the speed of the player but am confident we will see it at some point.
Microsoft should not wait for the cable card to employ an HDTV solution for MCE. Initially they should work out a trial relationship with Comcast as they are already a significant business partner.
Microsoft should convince Comcast that they have the DRM in place and offer to share more of the revenue from the operating system for Comcast HDTV users if need be. They can then negotiate more aggressive deals with other providers down the line and much of this might be irrelevant anyway in a few years depending on how the technology — especially broadband — develops.
The important thing is to get something in place at market, today, which I suspect may already even be in the works — and if it is in the works they need to be hyping this with news releases or at least leaking the info into the blogosphere to generate buzz and excitement. Microsoft’s typical tight-lipped top-secret approach is not the best approach here.
TiVo negotiated a deal with DirecTV to record HDTV and while the deal may be lopsided towards DirecTV, if TiVo can do it Microsoft can do it. If the talks are not going so well perhaps they need to change the negotiating team that is meeting with the cable/satellite providers.
Hmmm. I don’t even have a 2-second delay on my library. With 12,000 songs, it takes five seconds to access it the first time, and then the response is instantaneous. Windows Media Player’s library is indexed; in fact, the index file format was changed in WMP10. It would be nice if it were documented, but I saw a performance improvement when I upgraded to WMP10.
As for those nasty cable companies, I see no evidence that they are willing to negotiate with anyone. By rights, they should be falling all over themselves to get Tivo’s user interface and brand loyalty, but they’re not. I think the DirecTV/Tivo deal was a fluke, that happened because DirecTV needed some help differentiating itself way back when. The reason they’re dumping Tivo is the same reason the cable companies won’t negotiate–they don’t want to share.
Media Player 10 is indeed faster, but only slightly. For large libraries it is still unacceptable and many digital media enthusiasts have substantial and growing libraries these days. If you are spending the money on the PC it really should handle any size library.
My thoughts are that everything is negotiable. Microsoft is already recording HDTV for Comcast — just not on the MCE platform. Surely they have at least a modicum of clout with Comcast and when the deal is put together the right way I’m sure it will get done.
Alternatively Microsoft could choose to try and develop a method to capture the HDTV signals without the assistance of the cable/satellite providers and record to high def. This might be more difficult technically speaking but when they are alleged to be spending $20 billion on this product certainly possible.
One way or the other without HDTV MCE is toast.
Try polling current HDTV subscribers and asking them if they’d ever go back to non HDTV and you’ll get no takers. The sales of the HDTV units and the word of mouth buzz is spreading like wildfire right now.
I’m starting to get buyer’s remorse with our new Gateway Windows Media Center 2005. Seems like an overpriced, wannabe TiVo and doesn’t even play DVDs as good quality as our $79 progressive scan DVD player through our HDTV.
Yes, I am reading :).
The library is indexed. The problem Thomas is experiencing is a problem with the interaction between WMP and MCE. It is being addressed. And as you pointed out, Thomas’s collection is abnormally large.
Thomas, I would be curious to know which music players do a good job of handling your large collection and which one’s don’t? What gives you the best perf?
As for the HDTV issue, you know my thoughts on the subject…
TDavid, sorry to hear you returned your MCE, I wish I saw your post earlier because I might have been able to help you with your DVD problem. It really should provide much better quality than a $79 progressive scan player.
I have some thoughts posted about all these negative articles here: http://blog.mattgoyer.com/categories/mediaCenter/2004/12/30.html#a3897
The library is incredibly slow on plain Windows XP Pro. Perhaps it’s a problem with the interaction between WMP and W.
I’m using MCE 2k5 with the included WMP10, and for some reason, if i click-and-drag a video onto the screen (to change it), or double-click another video while one is already playing, or pause the video playing and restart it, it starts playing really slow and choppy. Does anyone else have this problem? The other issue I’m having is that I’ve put some recorded TV shows into the My Videos folder, but they don’t always play, especially the divx 6 ones. It just goes to the resume/restart/delete screen. If anyone else is having these problems, I’d really appreciate some feedback. Thanks!
Just got an MCE box last week, and due to the performance of My Music am thinking about returning it as being basically unusable. For me it is quicker to go the old fashioned route of picking a cd from the shelf and placing it in the cd tray than it is to try and open My Music.
I bought MCE thinking I could use it as a jukebox. I’ve got about 250gb of music which I’ve been adding to for at least the past five years. Now I found that years of work correctly tagging my mp3’s has been wasted as MCE uses a tag that I’ve never seen before i.e “AlbumArtist”, so none of my albums appear as albums in MCE.
The software won’t even let me do a directory browse like in My Videos to quickly get to My Music.
Frustrating to the extreme, and embarrasing to – was looking forward to showing off MCE to friends, but now I just try to avoid showing anyone the My Music module.
Well, I have a lowly 8K songs in the library. Media Center 10 did not ask me what file types to search for. As a result my library has lots of duplicate titles with wave and mp3 side by side. It’s messed up.
Can anyone tell me how to delete the entire library list so I can start over? I’m not up to deleting one song at a time…..
Thanks,
Tim
O.K
I think I figured it out. It’s done in Media Player. You Know, I just bought a media system from H.P. (z558) and after about 15 min. with thier tech support they could not say. For 59 bucks a hour they could transfer me to a group that might know……! I’ll not be using Media Center’s My Music for now.
Thanks
i have xp pro
15k tracks
the media library on mp10 is awful. unusable. i can navigate with explorer better.
by unusable….. an 8 second lag when trying to change from genre to artist. i have gig of mem, latest p4 and a clean well maintained OS. photoshop kicks arse, business objects rips, yet wmp10 library is snail pace.
MS please please please fix for wmp11
I have been using media center edition since it was a beta. My Music was fine up until MCE 2005 and WMP10 came out. I have around 30k songs, all mp3’s, coming in at 150GB’s. My MUsic is completely unusable. It takes a full 10 -15 seconds to even show the lists of artists. I think there is a plugin somewhere that lets you play by directory browsing though.
Yes, here it is:
http://www.ssw.com.au/daniel/Home/MediaCentre.aspx
As far as HDTV is concerned, the consumer electronic industry has turned HDTV technologies into a confusing quagmire. Over the AIR broadcast is like the only thing that is set in stone. They are soo worried about content protection to agree on one standard, such as ATSC. I dont think Microsoft is to blame for this. Joe Consumer walks into Bestbuy and thinks that he can get this awesome picture by just buying this great HDTV… Uh, yeah, about that… Sorry dude. He is in for a whole world of hurt, unless he is a techie.
I say kudo’s to MS for actually supporting the OTA atsc card. I’m not even aware of a PVR card that can input a non ATSC hdtv signal? I think satelite and cablecompanies only hand off hdmi or QAM…
A note to T. Corcoran:
I had duplicate song titles in my library as well. Like so many others, I had decided that MCE was close to useless for music. However, I just added the plug in to browse folders. Also, as I was messing with that, I noticed that there were many folders set up in the My Music “add folders’ settings. I removed all but the folder I want to have for Music. It seems that my duplicate file names have disappeared and my library looks much better. So make sure you don’t have extra folders set up for My Music such as “All Users,” etc.