Media Center on Home Server? Still no go

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Via Ian Dixon, I read Andrew Grant’s account of his experiment running Windows Media Center on a Windows Home Server machine.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but will note in passing that Andrew’s experiment ended very quickly. 😉

For a lot of people, this is the holy grail. I continue to believe that the reverse configuration makes more sense today, with Home Server running in a dedicated VM on a Media Center machine.

Maybe in 3-5 years Media Center will be written in such a way that it can run as a role on a server. But not today.

Published by Ed Bott

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11 thoughts on “Media Center on Home Server? Still no go”

  1. Something I truly believe is that MS have missed a trick with WHS.

    They should have shipped a super wizardised, AD “lite”. There’s plenty of features in AD and their server product line that would lend themselves perfectly to the home and could even address many of the complaints people have but aren’t aware of because they are usually hidden from them in the corporate world.

    I did a video explaining it a bit more here http://www.alphaxion.com/?p=61

    Oh, and if you’re looking for a good media centre app I recommend Mediaportal at http://www.team-mediaportal.com 🙂

    alphaxion

  3. but the only real purpose for SBS is to get your hands onto exchange. Also, as I said it would be feature reduced – no federation, limited number of computer and user accounts etc.

  6. Is there any reason supplied by MS why Media Center was not included in Home? That’s the one deal breaker for me.

  7. Ideally MS should take the concept of taking a crippled OS and calling it “home edition” out into the snowy tundra, strip it of its clothing and leave the drooling lobotomised cretin to the elements!

  8. Alphaxion, have you ever used Windows Home Server? Before you go flinging insults, you might want to actually look at it. I have both a Windows Server 2008 box and a Windows Home Server box here. Completely different beasts, and I like them both, a lot, for what they do.

  9. I have installed WHS using the copy I get in the MSDN subscription where I work – The insult was for the client OS’s they call “home” as in vista and XP – which are crippled, no other way to describe them.

    I’m sorry if I didn’t make that bit clear. I do like the start they have made with WHS but as I have said, I don’t think they went far enough with it. For all intents and purposes, WHS is nothing more than a backup and media serving box with a token “password sync” feature.

    And just to reiterate, I’m not asking them to implement full AD featureset, rather a reduced set of features – effectively user accounts and specifically the restrictions you can place on them using account settings (logon times being one big item), GPO’s and delegation in order to restrict kids from doing things before you believe them to be ready, roaming profiles, disk quota’s etc.

    I guess the major stumbling block is the very presence of home edition clients, which cannot be added to domain. Sadly, with the way home clients are built I don’t think there would be a way to produce an SP that could reintroduce the missing system components.

    Maybe this is exactly why AD is missing from WHS and I’ve pondered my way to the reason.

    Don’t think I’m merely picking up on buzz words, I have been a sysadmin for 9 years now and understand what you can do with AD and how it can benefit the average home.

  10. It still amazes me that Microsoft “can’t” bring Media Center to WHS! SageTV has had the ability to use WHS as a Media Center server for over a year now and it works great. Surely the company that brings us WHS in the first place could easily do it couldn’t they?

  11. Brent, they’ve been a little busy this year with a couple major bugs. Now that those are fixed, I have no doubt they are working on the best way to add this much-requested feature to the next edition.

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