AP Technology Writer Matthew Fordahl has a thorough review of his experience with a Media Center Extender today.

He describes the benefits well and nails the one big drawback of these devices: They do not work well with wireless 802.11g network connections (although it’s possible that a dedicated 802.11a connection would suffice).

His other criticism, that the extender doesn’t play protected content from HBO and other sources, was true last month but has since been fixed with a downloadable software update. (Update: Ryan, in a comment, notes this isn’t true for Xbox extenders. He’s right. This support page has links to the updates for Linksys and HP extenders and promises that an Xbox update will be available this month.)

Good reading, if you’re thinking of getting one of these things.

Update: I missed the same writer’s longer, more detailed (and generally quite positive) review of HP’s Media Center PC. The good news is that both of these articles will probably appear in a lot of newspapers around the United States and encourage people to take a look at this technology.

Phat Matt (Matt Fletcher) has created an MCE wiki (a collaborative, community-based collection of content and links). You can view it here:

MCE 2005 – Windows Media Center Edition 2005 Resources.

Because it’s a wiki, anyone can add or edit content. Cool idea.

Update: Appears to be offline, perhaps permanently.

If you have a Media Center PC (or if you’re thinking about getting one), bookmark mcesoft.nl:

Media Center Plug-ins are little programs that give new possibilities or expand existing functionality to your Windows XP Media Center Edition. Many programmers have made and are still making these Media Center plug-ins to make features available which aren’t there when you have a Media Center “out of the box” This goes from features like a system for categorising your DVD’s and Movies complete with descriptions, actors and director info to features like having your local current Weather situation and forecast available, but it also includes the possibility to listen to or watch online media or the possibility to edit or compress recorded television and make a DVD of it. This site is dedicated to those plug-ins and we will try to give you as much info as possible about them.

I just installed the latest version of MCEWeather. Excellent, and it works with my Media Center Extender as well.

Ryan Hurst has put together some excellent add-ins for Windows Media Center 2005. I just installed one that provides local weather data from the Weather Channel and another that lets me browse and edit my Netflix queue using the MCE 10-foot interface. Very cool! (If only they worked with a Media Center Extender…)

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.

1. 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.
2. 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?

Thanks to Mavromatic (a blog I had never heard of before) for this pointer to the Teatro D1 – The Super Media Center 2005 PC.

Unbelievable! This is one sexy Windows Media Center PC. The TEATRO D1 is like any finely crafted Italian product. It sports a built-in 7″ 1280×720 VGA touchscreen, dual layer DVD burner and 500gb of HD space. You can record two shows at once (also has a FM tuner). The TEATRO D1 has integrated Wi-Fi, great for older homes where Cat5 is not easily pulled. I can’t read Italian so it’s hard to navigate the OnCinema site to find out more information… like pricing… but I expect this thing to be in the $3-5k range. The TEATRO D1 comes in silver (pictured) and black. It seems like all the really cool stuff in this space is coming from our friends in the EU. Which kind of makes sense, since Europeans have always been known for there love for quality and sexy styling… I guess we are known for $29 Target DVD players and Cheetos.

I’ve been studying Italian this year, so I was able to stumble around the Web site, understand most of the text, and determine that this baby would set you back a cool 5000 Euros, which at current exchange rates is about $6750. Mamma mia!

The good news is that you can buy a similar looking case from A-Tech Fabrication and build your own for considerably less. They’ll even install the touch screen for $400…

Thanks to James Fee at Digital Media Thoughts for the pointer.

The AVS Forum is filled with really smart people who know a lot about all sorts of digital home entertainment topics. I stumbled across their Mce 2005 Faq today. Wow! What a great resource. They’ve even managed to get Jay P. Kapur, Lead Program Manager of the Windows Media Center TV Team, to post.

If you use MCE 2005, bookmark this thread. (And set aside an hour or more to read it. This thread’s currently at 15 pages and growing…)

If you’re thinking about buying or building a Media Center PC, here are two communities of users that can be a big help:

• The Green Button (TGB) is run by a couple of Media Center enthusiasts and has an excellent forum, as well as links to downloads and their own homegrown knowledge base. Warning: The site can be slow to load.
• XPMCE.com also has an active forum. Its links to downloads and its FAQ are less complete than TGB’s.

In my research, I’ve found both forums useful.

I finally got a Linksys Media Center Extender. Impressive! It plugged right in, set up quickly, and works extremely well over my wired Ethernet connection. I’m not sure how well a wireless connection would do, so I’m glad I made sure to put an Ethernet jack behind the TV when we built our house!

These things are surprisingly hard to find. I originally ordered one from Buy.com, but after I had waited three days for a confirmation I sent them an e-mail and they admitted it wasn’t in stock after all, despite what their Web page said. (This is the third time Buy.com has pulled this crap. They’re off my list of acceptable suppliers.) Next, I went to Amazon, but they said it might take a week to ship, so I ordered from Newegg.com and had the box in 48 hours.

Probably the most impressive feature is the speed and ease of managing my digital music collection, which has close to 12,000 tracks on nearly 1000 albums. It takes up to 5 seconds for the listing to appear initially, but after that, searches are nearly instantaneous, and the sound quality is exceptional.

I’m compiling a list of minor glitches I’ve encountered, but all in all the Media Center products are working spectacularly well, and I have no serious complaints.

P.S.: Amazon.com has the Linksys Media Center Extender on sale today for close to the best price I’ve seen: $250, with free shipping. Amusingly, their product details page says the box weighs 145 pounds and standard shipping will be $90. Of course, the actual weight is about 6 pounds. I sent a correction last week but they still haven’t fixed the mistake.

I’m so thrilled with the way my test PC runs Windows Media Center Edition 2005 that I’m building a new MCE system from scratch. Coincidentally, Scoble pointed me to Matt Goyer, who is doing the same thing. Here are his specs:

I’m building an NTSC Media Center for my family. My requirements are that it’s in a HTPC case, has wifi, and is low cost. Here’s what I’m thinking:

• Shuttle XPC Barebone System for Socket 478 at 533/800MHz FSB Intel CPU, Model SB65G2 $190
• Intel Celeron D 330 2.66 GHz, 533 MHz FSB, 256K L2 Cache Processor $88
• Seagate 200GB 7200RPM IDE Hard Drive $116
• NEC 16X Double Layer DVD RW Drive, Black $65
• 512MB DDR PC2700 from Crucial $83
• Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500MCE (dual NTSC tuner)
• ATI or NVIDIA graphics card w/s-video out

Is a Celeron going to be enough? Any way to do this cheaper?

My setup is similar:

• Shuttle XPC Barebone System for Socket 478 at 533/800MHz FSB Intel CPU, Model ST61G4, $245
• Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz 800MHz (Northwood), refurbished, $175
• 200GB Maxtor SATA drive, $108
• 512MB DDR PC3200 RAM from Crucial, $92
• NEC ND-3500A DVD+/-RW 16x, $67
• Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150MCE TV Receiver, $70

I looked long and hard at the Shuttle XPC cases and chose the ST61G4 because it has excellent integrated graphics. In the small form factor Shuttle cases, not having an extra video card is a big deal. It also cuts down on noise, because there’s no video card fan. I read lots of reviews, too. This excellent and very thorough report from Xbit Labs probably had the biggest influence on me. I chose the refurbished processor specifically because I wanted a Northwood CPU; from everything I’ve read, the newer Prescott CPUs just get too hot. I have nothing but good things to say about the Hauppauge tuner cards. Matt chose the two-tuner version, but I am willing to go with the simpler one-tuner version because I have to go through a cable box, and the PVR-500MCE (which Matt chose) has a single coax input, with its splitter on the card itself. The only way you can use both tuners on this device is if your input comes directly from a single feed (no premium channels). (Update: I switched to the dual-tuner card a month or so later, getting a second cable box, for $5 a month, to feed it. The first input goes to the coax connector on the DVR card; the second input uses the S-video connector. Media Center manages both tuners quite nicely.)

How does this system compare to Matt’s? Well, I’m spending a few bucks more on the Shuttle case, but the net cost is actually going to be less, because I don’t need a separate video card. I’m paying about $86 more for the CPU, but I think the performance boost from a Pentium 4 at 3GHz on an 800MHz FSB is worth it when compared to a 2.66GHz Celeron on a 533MHz bus. Everything else is about the same, cost-wise.

All the pieces should be here this week. Whether I’ll actually put everything together this week is questionable, as I have several deadlines. I’ll probably steal 10 minutes here and 15 minutes there and build it a little at a time.

When all is said and done, I hope to have the best of both worlds: The Cox HDTV-PVR recording anything I intend to watch in HDTV, and the MCE box doing lots of other stuff, especially movies on non-HD premium channels. The recording capacity of the HDTV-PVR box is so limited it’s not practical for everyday use. The digital music and photo features of the MCE box are killer as well. But that’s a topic for another post…

Update 27-Dec-2006: The Shuttle system is now a doorstop. Details here and here.