Vista Media Center has been great, except for some issues that don’t bother others but me:
- It runs on Windows Vista
- I have to do an ugly hack to get guide information for subchannels.
More importantly, it doesn’t give me the flexibility to do compression. I’m using a 120 GB drive, and OTA digital TV takes lots of space. BlueRay might be important down the line, but I’m watching on a SD television, I don’t have a blue-ray drive, or any movie discs. The fact that I’m using a Media Center remote works out well too, but I think I can get by with it working. Oh, and ` GB of RAM was inadequate at times… watching that circle just go around and around got old. RAM is cheap, but I wasn’t ready to get more RAM.
So, the straw that broke the camels back was my mom-in-laws request to record the “Great Pumpkin” episode of Charlie Brown. I accidentally recorded an hour of weather and news, because the guide information for the subchannel of ABC Broadcast Television was the same. (My fault, I should have checked… but I was busy… that’s why I built a DVR…)
I hate to take some thing that is working well, and kill it, but hey… I wasn’t a real Vista Fan anyway and I want to use this Schedules Direct subscription, and I wanted to run Linux, and Media Portal is still in their nearly-infinite 1.0 release candidate… blah blah.
I’m mostly concerned about getting an Internet connection to the TV. The supposedly-final straw that tipped me over to Vista was support for a wireless G card that I had. I’m going to stick a wireless b card in and see if that works after I install.
