Media Center already does HDTV!

Digital media, Windows Media Center Edition 1 Minute

Matt Haughey at PVRBlog gets suckered by misunderstands SnapStream’s Beyond TV 4 announcement:

SnapStream have announced their next major rev will include support for HDTV recording and playback. This is pretty significant, as HDTV support in software PVR applications is still fairly new, with MythTV’s HD playback in early stages. It sounds like Beyond TV will support at least four different HD tuner cards as well.

By all reports, Microsoft’s Windows Media Center is holding off on support for HDTV recording/playback until Longhorn is released next year, so for those running windows-based home theater PCs, BeyondTV may be the only choice for quite a while.

Commenters, including me, have jumped all over Matt for getting this one 100% wrong. Here’s what I posted:

Excuse me? Windows Media Center Edition 2005 has supported over-the-air HDTV since day one. The others are actually playing catch-up.

The missing piece of the puzzle, which no one has yet, is CableCard support. I’ve written about the details here.

Microsoft and all the other companies aren’t “holding off” on anything. The hardware to decode HDTV over cable needs to exist first, and it needs to be approved by CableLabs.

And of course over-the-air HDTV is no big deal. I’ll have a lot more to say on HDTV, cable, and the upcoming update to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 later today.

Update: Rakesh from Snapstream makes the valid point that their original press release made no comparisons with other software, so it’s unfair to say Matt was “suckered” by the announcement. He’s right. I apologize and have edited this post accordingly. Also, Matt has corrected his post now.

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Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

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2 thoughts on “Media Center already does HDTV!”

  1. Ed, in reference to the “suckered” thing, we never said or implied anything about how our pre-announcement of Beyond TV 4 features compared to those in Media Center. Matt @ pvrblog just made a mistake, that I think he’s now corrected.

    Rakesh
    SnapStream

  2. Fair comment, Rakesh. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that Snapstream had done anything wrong. You’ve got a good company, with good products. I’ve paid for the software, even!

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