Sean Alexander notes that Windows Media Center Edition has a full-fledged software development kit and wonders: “What applications, games, and services would really make MCE shine?”

Thomas Hawk came up with a long list that boils down to one statement: “MCE should own the home.” I’m not sure I agree with that sweeping goal. There are some great items on his list, but the ten-foot interface isn’t right for everything. Not only that, but every extension comes with a cost in complexity and a risk of destabilizing the system. I want my Media Center to be solid and dependable, like an appliance. But that still leaves lots of room for add-ons. So, here’s my list:

1. An alternate interface for home automation. But not the only one, please. I don’t want to have to turn on the entire home media system to turn off the lights. The home automation functions should be directly related to activities that I might want to control when using my Media Center: dimming lights so I can watch a movie and controlling the whole-house sound system, for instance.
2. Integration with voice mail and Caller ID. Again, this should be an alternate interface, not the primary one. I don’t necessarily want to play back every incoming message in booming 5.1 digital stereo sound. Give me the option to see what messages are available, but assume that I’ll play back most of them through the telephone handset.
3. A “build your own headline news” module. Make this a live, constantly updated list of available news segments from CNN, ABC, MSNBC, BBC, whoever. Make the list customizable so I can choose not to have Fox News on the list. When I’m ready to watch, I can use the remote to select the items I want to see and then MCE will build the “show” for me.
4. Podcasting subscriptions. This one should be obvious. Queue up available podcasts for me and let me play them back through my home audio system or PC speakers. It would be really nice if clips could be indexed so I could skip to individual segments.
5. A “home message” module. I’d like to type a note (better yet, be able to pick from ready-made templates and custom templates I create) and have it appear on the screen for other people in my household. “Went to the grocery store. Back by dinner time.” “Joanie called. Wants to go to the movies Wednesday.” That sort of thing. A screen saver could let me or my wife know there’s a message waiting.
6. Photo Story for the Media Center. This one should be a slam-dunk.
7. My Netflix. Ryan Hurst has written a superb extension for this now. It could be even better.
8. Support for CD/DVD changers. I have a 300–CD Pioneer changer; unfortunately the only way to manage disks in this device is to input information manually. Ugh. I’d love to have that process automated and bypass the awful character limits on the Pioneer front panel.

Hmmm. As Thomas said, I could easily come up with 80 or 90 more. Good idea, Sean!

MCESoft links to the new MyHome plug-in, which allows you to control an X10 home automation system via a PC running Windows Media Center Edition 2005:

MyHome for Media Center is a plug-in to control your X10 home automation system. At this time it’s programmed to work with the PowerLinc II Serial/TW523 X10 Interface, a serial to X10 converter, but it may be revised to be modulair and support other hardware drivers if there is enough interest for it. There is no configuration needed for the plug-in to work, the COM ports are scanned and a connection to the X10 Interface is set up automaticly.

I’ve been meaning to look into adding X10 components to my home for a while, but never got around to it. I suspect one reason is the horrible reputation the company got for being … well, let’s call them a pioneer in the field of pop-up advertising on the Internet.

But the technology is really cool, even if their advertising is terrible.

Microsoft’s Sean Alexander may have moved over to the Longhorn group (congrats, Sean!) and off the Media Center team, but he’s still posting good stuff at Addicted to Digital Media:

ATI’s new Home Theater 550 Pro-based ATI TV Wonder Elite TV Tuner board was just released and started shipping to retailers today. I just got my hands on a board and have personally seen the quality of this standard-def tuner beat that of an upsampled signal on a high end HDTV set from a major manufacturer. That’s saying a LOT. Thanks to the 3D comb filter, you don’t get the “jitter effect” you normally see on overlayed graphics such as a CNN or NBC logo or sports scorebox. I cannot wait to put this board through it’s paces personally on my MCE box this weekend.

The Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) has certified this board as meeting or exceeding specifications for high-end consumer AV electronics.

If what I’ve seen hold true, this board significantly raises the bar for other PC-based TV tuner manufacturers. I know ATI has been investing heavily to develop this card to exacting quality.

I used the previous generation of ATI’s All-in-Wonder cards (I still own two, in fact). They were OK for their time, but once you experience hardware decoding you can’t go back to slow, crash-prone, software-based decoders like the AIW series. Lately I’ve been working with Hauppauge’s Win TV-PVR series of boards. The most recent addition is the dual-tuner WinTV-PVR-500MCE, which is now in full service here. Every Hauppauge board has performed exceptionally well, and this one is no exception. I’ll have more to say about it later. Meanwhile, I’m eager to try the new ATI board.

First, Thomas Hawk posts a long entry about his MCE Television and LaCie Big Disk Problems:

Well this weekend I attempted to rehook a television signal back into my MCE machine and I was reminded that television indeed may be the biggest thing still holding Media Center back. The issue really boils down to two things. 1. Really poor television quality and 2. Incredibly complex set up.

He did what you’re supposed to do when you’re asking for help, which is to provide all the details a support professional would need. And lo and behold, he gets some serious help from Microsoft’s Charlie Owen and Matt Goyer. Which is like taking your car in to the local dealer because it’s got a rattle and discovering that the factory’s top engineers are hanging around the shop that day. It’s very cool to get such top-level support and to know that your issues are certainly going to get fixed in the next release of MCE!

The more I read about Thomas’s system, the more I think he has a driver problem of some sort. He says, “I have always been disappointed with these USB 2 external drives. The Maxtors frequently give me I/O device errors when I try and copy large batches of .mp3 files, but this performance from LaCie is the worst yet.” And previously he’s described problems with file transfer operations taking inordinate amounts of time or failing completely.

This sounds very familiar. On a PC I used about two years ago, I had constant disk I/O problems. Those turned out to be related to a faulty audio driver of all things — it was conflicting with a disk controller driver and causing all sorts of havoc. When I updated both drivers, the problem went away. I currently have four or five external USB 2.0 drives, all running flawlessly. I never get I/O errors and I copy files at full rated speed all the time, moving lots of files (my music collection) and small numbers of really big files (recorded video) without any errors.

Thomas’s other issue is video quality:

Now maybe I’m just incredibly spoiled and forgot how bad MCE television quality is after spending the last few months watching all of my high def television on my DirecTV TiVo. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that there is more to it than this. One of the things that has perplexed me with MCE from day one is that there is a huge amount of signal degradation. …  A while back someone once suggested to me that the compression technology that MCE uses is inferior to the TiVo compression technology which was the reason why it looks so bad.

My experience is exactly the opposite. I have had a Series 1 TiVo for years, and when I switched to the MCE machine for SD recordings I was shocked by the improvement in quality. No, it doesn’t compare to the HDTV pictures I get from the cable box, but I really don’t see any degradation, and we’re able to watch SD programming without any complaints about picture quality. Drivers? Hardware? Or something else?

Overall, I think Thomas has nailed one of the major issues with this technology: For the mass market to accept Media Center PCs, they have to work like appliances. TiVo boxes meet that standard because they’re designed that way. An MCE box is designed to be expandable and extensible, which sounds great but also introduces the possibility that you’ll start fiddling around with an interesting utility, a flaky add-on, or a buggy driver and end up with a machine that crashes or exhibits odd behavior. Not an appliance, by any means.

What I’d like to see in a Media Center PC is an even more robust System Restore, with the ability to capture snapshots of the system and roll things back in the event something starts to misbehave. Windows XP has that feature now, but it takes expertise to work with it. A device that’s supposed to behave like an appliance should be capable of rolling back to a known good configuration without any muss or fuss.

XBox or HP?

I personally believe that the XBox is the perfect client for Windows XP Media Center Edition, and have been pushing for this option for years. I was ecstatic when I found out that the Extender for XBox was in development.

I’m now lucky enough to own both the HP x5400 and more recently Extender for XBox, and have spent some time comparing the two.

This is a very thorough review that should answer most of your questions if you’ve been thinking about integrating a Media Center PC into your home entertainment system. For what it’s worth, I have the Linksys extender, and it is identical in function to the HP model that Peter writes about. I highly recommend it.

In a comment on a post about Longhorn, my buddy Michael writes:

I’m confused about one thing: [Paul Thurrott] has a lengthy discussion about Windows MCE 2005 and it’s support for HDTV. But he has it as “already been released”, but I thought it was still a few months away. (maybe he’s talking beta release?)

Windows Media Center 2005 is out now. I’m running the official release. A few sites have recently posted details about a rumored upgrade this fall; as far as I know, that upgrade isn’t in beta yet. According to the rumors, HDTV support via Cable Card will be a feature in this upgrade.

MCE 2005 does indeed support over-the-air (OTA) HDTV. I have a Fusion HDTV card in my Media Center test computer. I hooked up a simple indoor antenna and I was able to watch broadcasts from one local station in HDTV. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a reliable signal from any other stations, making the indoor antenna experiment a bust. I’m off to Radio Shack for a new antenna one of these days to see if it works any better, but it looks like an outdoor antenna is the best way to get access to OTA HDTV.

The Fusion card is QAM-compatible. I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the subject and in theory, it should be able to decode an unencrypted HDTV signal from my cable company. I don’t think that MCE 2005 supports QAM, however, only ATSC, and thus it can only tune OTA HDTV channels for now. I’m still trying to wrap my arms around how all this technology interacts. If anyone has any insights to offer, feel free to add them in the comments.

This little paragraph was dropped in casually in the middle of a write-up on the new Shuttle Media Center XPC at AnandTech:

The XPC is obviously designed for a more set-top applications and thus will also feature a cable card reader as well as HDTV output. The next version of Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition due out in Q3 will support cable card and content protected HDTV content over digital cable services, making this device actually useful from a HDTV standpoint.

Kudos to Jason Dunn at Digital Media Thoughts for catching this one. Is it true? Ah, that’s another story, isn’t it?

Over at PaidContent.org, Jeremy Allaire sent in five predictions for 2005. This was the most interesting one, in my opinion:

— Microsoft Media Center 2005 Will Be a Hit. Third times a charm, and Microsoft now has a very strong product in the market. The PC industry is putting real weight behind it as it allows them to have a “whole product” sale with their emerging base of LCD and Plasma TV’s (higher margin), and lets them dabble in the content business (a breath of fresh air from the cut-throat PC world); the CE industry is shipping dozens of connectors, extenders, and portable devices that support it, and the base of content companies getting behind the platform is impressive. Best of all, the product is really great, and the tens of millions of consumers who go out ot buy new PCs will be tempted by the marginal incremental cost to get the promise of whole house convergnece on the cheap. Yes, there are problems and issues with the product, but the list is short and Microsoft will nail them down before the end of the year. This will not be a product that is “pushed”, but one that is pulled as consumer word-of-mouth helps fuel sales.

I think he’s right. I’ve read a lot about the cutthroat competition between TiVo, the cable companies, satellite providers, and Microsoft (not to mention Apple and Linux-based PC solutions). But the salient fact is that this market is going to grow explosively, which means that even a company that loses market share could still find itself growing.

Should be an interesting year.