Windows Media Center Edition vs. The World 423
sam_christ writes "An article in today's Investor's Business Daily (Google cache) and an article by TV industry pundit/predictions-huckster Philip Swann say the same thing: that Microsoft's Media Center Edition will be a big flop in 2005. Meanwhile, from what I can tell much more powerful alternatives to Microsoft's MCE bloatware are thriving: commercial products like Snapstream (see their 6-tuner Medusa PVR built for about $1200), Showshifter and open-source freeware like Mediaportal and MythTV. From what I've read about Microsoft MCE and all of its DRM and content restrictions, I have to agree with both of these articles."
Snapstream? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why isn't Apple in the PVR/DVR space? (Score:5, Interesting)
Face it, Apple does this shit right. It would be TiVo-easy, probably easier, dead sexy to look at and would integrate with your iPod and desktop or laptop for on-demand streaming. And the best part is...It Would Just Work(tm).
Everyone said, "No one will buy an iPod! Are you crazy?" and now it's the geek-chic accessory of darn near everyone. Why wouldn't a PVR/DVR from Apple be the same? Once it's on enough episodes of Cribs or put into enough cars on Pimp My Ride everyone will want one.
I tend to agree (Score:3, Interesting)
IMO people who are tech savvy who would be more inclined towards a PC based system (as opposed to an appliance like TiVo) will be non-plussed by the infelxibility and restrictions in MPC.
The "sweet spot" that MS is targetting, that I'm not sure exists as a viable market is the consumer that wants to run their media on their single PC. Figure the odds that the person ready to control their entertainment with a PC has only one PC.
As a current user... (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, I agree that the cost of prebuilt MCE systems is too high. I think what we need to see is scaled down systems in A/V cases that cost around 999$. I've priced out building my own systems and they can be built well below this price on Newegg, so I would think that a PC manufacturer should at least be able to come close.
In regard to the other packages out there...I had nothing but problems with BeyondTV and Sage, but it was mostly due to lack of support for my ATI AIW card. One thing I did notice in the process, though, was that MCE had much simpler and more intuitive interfaces than these other applications. Frankly, I think that an average user would not even consider messing with one of these programs when they could buy an MCE box all configured and ready to go.
From what I've read about Microsoft MCE..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Neither has the author of TFA.
You all hate MSFT, and want to see them fail in the home. And this guy is your hero because he predicts that MS sucks. That's all fine and good.
But remember Sun Tsu's first and most important rule of war: Know your enemy.
The most rabid zealots show again and again that they have no fucking idea what MSFT products can do, or how they work.
That said, MCE's actually pretty well put together. It's far beyond MythTV, especially when it comes to hardware support.
And the DRM is on the CONTENT. You only use it if the CONTENT requires you use it. The DivX files you download off KaZaa will play the same in MCE as they do in linux.
But, MCE can play those movies you pay a few bucks to download off the 'net, will MythTV? My point being, OSS projects need to incorporate the same thing. The lack of legit DVD support has already crippled linux as an "entertainment" platform.
Look how well iTunes is working. Bandwidth is going up dramatically, theres a lot of fiber to the home happening. It wont be long before there's an (actually *working*, high-def) iTunes for movies - and OSS better not miss the boat.
MythTV (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, this is another example: MS does it, but Open Source does it better.
Re:cable co (Score:5, Interesting)
With that kind of mind set, they are. But lets imagine what could be:
Take a broadband pipe and stick it into a box with - GASP! - unbreakable DRM. Now, the content providers (read: NBC, ABC, CBS, HBO, et cetera) are now free to use bittorrent-like P2P (GASP!) technology for their distribution method - no cableco or satellite company needed.
Here's how it works:
The data is cached in advance (think of it as "buffering" only it does it hours in advance - while you're sleeping, maybe). The box, with its trusty DRM, will not allow the media to be viewed until a preset time. Lets say that you want to catch the Sopranos but you don't have cable. The box will download it in advance and then let you watch it simultaneously with the rest of the world - without a cable or satellite TV company. This will be to TV what the iPod is to music. No monthly subscription - just pay for what you buy. Don't want the commercials? Fine - just pay extra and you'll get the version without them.
The geeks really need to stop hating all aspects of DRM. Ultimately, it will make the world a better place and eliminate eveil entities like the cable companies (though they will just become the bandwidth providers).
xbmc (Score:3, Interesting)
PCs vs. PVRs (Score:4, Interesting)
PCs and PVRs are just not comparable. Complete apples and oranges. You can't compare a Tivo or other PVR with a PC that's connected to a TV and the Internet. While it's nice that a PVR is meant specifically for its purpose and does it very well (even better if you know how to hack it), I can find many more advantages to having a PC connected to a TV instead.
First off, do you need more hard drive space? You buy a new secondary drive. You can't do that with PVRs unless you hack (in violation of contract if you rent the box) or buy/rent a newer one with a bigger hard drive.
If you don't want to watch TV, a wireless keyboard and mouse/trackball will allow you to surf on your TV. You can't do that with a PVR.
If the box is beefy enough, there is no reason why you can't use the PC as a gaming console. I'm sure that I'd have a lot more fun playing multiplayer "Ghost Recon" on my 55" widescreen TV than on my 21" monitor -- potential burn-in not withstanding.
There are other reasons, but I've made my point. Snd I'm sure that the vast majority of us on
Linux would have the same benefits, so I don't want to act as though only Windows can satisfy my requirements. But only us geeks would actually be comfortable using Linux for this purpose. The vast majority of people are unfortunately still brainwashed that Microsoft = Heaven, Bill Gates = God, and anything else != easy-to-use. So, properly positioned and marketed, XP MCE can be a highly effective alternative to PVRs to a huge amount of people.
That being said, I'm hearing a lot of good things about MythTV. I'm going to have to look into that. And I'll have a spare system shortly that's more than capable of handling the task. I'll pass on the PVR, thank you.
Re:Why isn't Apple in the PVR/DVR space? (Score:3, Interesting)
If there is ANYONE out there that could parlay legal downloads for video programming, it's Apple Computer. The success of the iTunes Music Store has shown that you can make money on a legal download service for multimedia, so why no develop an iVideo store to download near-full screen DRM-protected QuickTime files? With the rapid ascension of broadband use here in the USA, there are enough Internet users out there to make this service viable.
Besides, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is very well-liked in the Hollywood community, so he has the "juice" to influence Hollywood types to implement this idea.
Check the contract (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Cable co can increase rate (look at contract)
2. Cable co might be paid off to rid people of PVR's.
3. $8/month will cost $350 in just under 2 years.
Re:Why isn't Apple in the PVR/DVR space? (Score:3, Interesting)
True now, but not so much a problem maybe 12-24 months from now.
I mean, look at Sony's new Playstation Portable. It's certainly not perfect, but it points to some enormous potential with portable video devices. With tiny iPod-compatible hard drives reaching 80 GB capacity already and battery technology improving, what's to say that by January 2006 Apple announces the video equivalent of the iPod with a 120 GB hard drive, decent battery life and a nice, small 16:9 aspect ratio LCD screen with USB 2.0/IEEE-1394 connections to download DRM-protected QuickTime files from your computer that you downloaded legally from the "iVideo" online store?
Re:cable co (Score:4, Interesting)
It's quite easy. You just don't upload the files until the day of. Some people might be able to watch it an hour or two early, but to be blunt, that's not a terrible loss. Advertisers? You'd just match the advertising for the TV media with the Internet media.
And it doesn't have to be DRMd. People can already use a TV tuner card to rip, remove commercials and resend it out. Another source is going to do nothing to this ability. What it WILL do, is that it will make the authorized broadcasts with commercials, come in a higher quality, and easier to obtain. Which will for the most part put the P2P nets out of that material. Now, you'll still see P2P trading, mostly of fan-subs of anime and any show that the network is stubborn upon, but of those shows, the revenue for the networks will actually go up.
I'm thinking a BitTorrent type client. You log on, and you can sort by shows by network and independents (who would have access to this as well, can sell their own ad time). Choose the ones to download and it would start downloading. It would be watermarked, so if any of the files with commercials went onto P2P networks, they could track it, and the advertisers could now how many people have watched their advertising. (What..and saving the networks bandwidth costs is a bad thing?), but the files would be instantly transferrable to any OS, and the whole new market of handheld media players.
In this way, the networks, for a minimum of cost, would actually nip TV trading in the bud, actually competing so aggressivly to render it moot. The only potential problem is for DVD sales, but if you have it in a higher quality, and add in lots of extras, DVD sets will sell to the most avid fans, which is what most do now anyway. There are very few that are priced for mass consumption.
Re:MythTV (Score:2, Interesting)
But I have MythMusic playing almost constantly. The jukebox supports ogg, mp3, flac, and other formats, and is really easy to use to set up playlists or just randomize a whole bunch of albums and/or singles.
Add to that the ability of Myth to archive and display photos from a digital camera.
Plus it plays divx, xvid, mpg and most wmv files. There's been very few video files it hasn't been able to play.
The built-in ability to rip and transcode CDs and DVDs is not something I expect MS to duplicate.
Add to all this that you can build a functional Myth system for around $500, or less if you already have some of the components. I built mine on a P-3 700 and it works like a charm.
Re:cable co (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, even without cable, you can get it over-the-air with an antenna - free of charge. But, say that the owners of the show wanted to find a few extra bucks. With good DRM, they could offer it without commercials or maybe a hour or two early.
Some of the 30 million viewers would be willing to pay $0.25 or $0.50 to have this option. That quickly works out to a lot of money. I'd really like to be the business that provides the tech to make this happen.
And I'm not suggesting that people get to "own" the media once they've paid for this service. Perhaps it might be a possibility but for the most part, content providers will want that to disappear once the premium functionality has been used up.
Re:Snapstream? (Score:1, Interesting)
WinTV-PVR (Score:3, Interesting)
So maybe not 2006, but I'm sure UHF/VHF days are numbered. At the same time, I can't get decent broadcast in my area, so the one decent HDTV tuner just won't work for me.
So anyone's best guess on how long before an NTSC PVR is rendered obsolete by VHF/UHF->HDTV migration?
i'll bite. (Score:3, Interesting)
Inferior earlier versions of the product might have tainted opinion. The current version, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, is the firm's third-generation offering.
Media Center is on its third generation over the course of 3 years. Showing progress is not weakness.
Consumers might decide it's easier to just buy a PVR from TiVo or their cable or satellite provider rather than buy a full-function PC. Plus, finding a place for the PC next to their TV can be a problem.
Headline fron
The alternatives, are not.
Yes the DRM is very damning, as of right now I am stuck copying these drm-ms files onto my laptop and playing them through this windows operating system, how dare they. Completly unacceptable, and I thank you soo much for bringing that up even though the main article mentions nothing about it.
This far right is like listening to Daily show at night and listening to Rush in the morning. You live and breathe to get your propiganda, even on things you know nothing about. Your taking news articles and posting a completly different spin on them in the hopes of readers beliving you and not reading the article.
Can these schedule video playback easily? (Score:2, Interesting)
We have a very limited budget and if there is an open source solution or a software solution that allows us to use inexpensive PC hardware, that would be ideal.
We will be producing a content ourselves (probably via a macintosh as well as from video tape through traditional video editing means). So, I would imagine that we would rip the video all to hard disk, download the video files produced o the macintosh and then schedule it to be played back. We only have one channel to fill so the system does not need to be too fancy. When we are not playing content, we have a public services board that displays a little slide show of what is going on in the town. I can see some of these PVRs allow you to show photo slides through your TV - this idea would work well if we could automate when the slide would show and when and what videos would show.
The system now is not software based at all. We have a controlling box that does nothing more than turn on video tapes and switch to show that tape. We program the video switching device when to rewind, when to play and when to stop - so to my mind doing this all on a computer should not be that much different and I hope it would not cost too much while giving us more flexibility. Once it was software based, we could control it and automate it from there.
However, the question is where to start and if any of the open source PVR can do some of the job with little or no coding changes.
Also, if anyone has experience with building your own PVR in the Concord, MA area - please send us an email.
http://www.concordtv.org/
Capitalism != Free Markets (Score:2, Interesting)
Contrary to popular belief, and the belief of many of his supporters, Chomsky has good things to say about free markets, although he thinks there are three main areas where they work poorly: Banking (due to moral hazard), Health Care (it cannot be stored and consumed later), and broadcast (airwaves are scarce). OTOH he also says in an extended interview (one of the Real Story series), "Over long periods of time, Free Markets do a better job of distributing wealth than any other known system". Not something many of his supporters know, and that Real Story book did not ask followup questions...
Re:WinTV-PVR (Score:2, Interesting)
My preferred card would be the PVR-500, and get 2 tuners in one. But I get the impression that its support is not quite there yet, either. (It might be that the PVR-500 is effectively 2 PVR-150's on one card.) I also get the impression that work is proceeding on both cards, and it's a matter of time, not release of documentation.
Re:People hate DRM (Score:3, Interesting)
You know why they don't care? Because it doesn't affect them one bit... People I know go to the video or retail store, pick out a movie, and watch it. Region encoding doesn't stop that.
You only know boring people.
I know (and am) people who love movies that come from somewhere else than hollywood, love jap games that never make it legally over here, etc. The fucking region codes is a nightmare for people like that.
Apple's DRM is to support lockin to their portable music player and to their store. Yeah, you can play MP3s on the device but if you want to get music legally you are probably going to go to iTMS
Legal music not from iTMS: Put CD in CD tray, drag CD icon to "library" icon. Watch the progres bar go.
I never bought as many CDs as during the napster days, and since the music industry went ahead and called me a thief for downloading samples to choose which CDs I wanted to buy, I now have absolutly NO concern doing what they don't want me to do. I want that behemoth to die, I want DRM to die, I want region encoding to die. I want these greedy bastards to stop pushing their crap at me! I don't want to hear the latest horror from their talentless boy band, teeny bopper, or hip-hop spewing moron.
I am not alone.
Wrong - people do not accept arbitrary change (Score:4, Interesting)
But when change is thrust upon people that comes with no discernible benefit to them, they do not take at. A very real example I have seen in person is multiple consoles being returned at stored because "they would not play DVD's when hooked up through a VCR". These people didn't know what Macrovision was, but they knew they didn't like how the product worked and so returned it - I do not work at a return counter or anything, these were random examples I saw three times in a row when waiting in line to return something myself.
Now think forward to the effects of things like the broadcasting flag. What happens when Grandpa can no longer record a game they want to watch on PPV? Chaos I say. A customer service nightmare for whatever company is so foolish as to make use of the flag. And if enough broadcasts do make use of the flag, an eventual shift in what people watch to media that does let them control the pace and time and place they choose to watch things.
It is not too hard to see people getting fed up with TV and broadcasters. What follows naturally? Well, right now Tivo's are embedded in cable and satellite boxes. Imagine what happens when instead Tivo starts bundling TV services!!! They are already starting down that path to push movies to consumers directly along with Netflix - and when they take over the most profitable part of broadcasting (PPV) can the other parts be far behind?
My experience with MCE and its DRM ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Last month my spouse got tired of me futzing around with the MythTv box and purchased a MCE 2005 PC for the living room [pcmag.com]. At first I thought I would hate it because of the noted DRM, but after setting it up and using it for a while I have to say that I am impressed. The machine runs smoothly and I now finally have a slick/easy way to browse my MP3 and DVD backups off of my main file server. I am really impressed with how well the box plays DVD backups. After testing about thirty DVD backups I have not found anything that has DVD menus that choke the box (wish I could say the same for my homebrew solutions). The DRM has absolutely no control over my use of the box. I only give the MCE box read only access to the content on my file server, which means that my media library will continue to be safe from being crippled with DRM. I continue to use my favorite apps [sourceforge.org] to rip/move content (audio/video/tivo/dvd) to my collection on my main file server.
The MCR 2005 box is not perfect. I will still continue hack away with Linux and MythTv, but now there is a PC in the living room that my whole family can use to enjoy my media library.
Also, writing add-ins is very easy [msdn.com], there is a good sized developer community [thegreenbutton.com] and the SDK is a free download [microsoft.com].
Re:Guess what? (Score:3, Interesting)
But how would it be if I were to go and purchase a CD that I would only be able to play on two CD players; if I were to purchase a DVD that I would only be able to play on two DVD players? Are we, or are we not treating non-physical objects as physical objects? Is there a difference between an electronic file and a physical medium or not? Apparently, at least as far as we can witness from the insane drive towards DRM, there IS in fact a difference between electronic files and physical media. What does this say, then, to the argument that there is no difference between downloading a file and stealing a physical CD from a shelf in a store? It's a mixed message at a minimum.
It seems to me that the industry is using electronic formats as an "excuse" to tighten their grip and to try to seize control of who gets to express themselves artistically - whether or not they are going to be successful remains to be seen. Of course it goes without saying that to follow this line of thought would lead one to conclude that many individuals are using electronic formats as an excuse to "steal" copyrighted material. Perhaps it's better to realize, that at least to some extent, the actions of individuals on both sides of this argument are wrong.
It seems to me that it would be so much easier to just do away with the DRM - for the consumer, that is - do away with the DRM and make the material available for a reasonable fee. That way, the consumer would be getting the electronic files from a trusted source, at the full speed of their internet connection, they wouldn't run the risk of viruses, they would have more consistent audio/video quality, and if they were to purchase these electronic files, those files could be archived away, and an individual would be able to build a collection, just as with LP's or cassette tapes or CDs or DVDs.
If everyone were to really look at the situation objectively, many would come to the conclusion that it could actually be easier to go with a legitimate service than downloading this or that or the other thing from some random quasi-anonymous source. However, this "ease" will never be achieved, and there will never be a level playing field, if this madness revolving around DRM doesn't stop.
If consumers were given a choice, a real, legitimate choice, to go with an online service for their content, at a reasonable price, everyone would realize that downloading stuff via unofficial channels is much more complicated, dangerous, unreliable and time consuming than going with a reasonably priced legitimate service.
Is there, or is there not a difference between electronic files and physical media? Should there be a difference, or not? How many people would buy a CD or DVD that would only play in a particular DVD player, or require some special firmware to play in a DVD player, or wouldn't play on a DVD player made by a smaller competitor? It's just not realistic to treat electronic files with such a tighter grip - the industry should be more realistic in their approach, but unfortunately, it's obvious that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
What better incentive for individuals to stop downloading files from unofficial, non-legitimate sources that don't contribute royalties to the artists who deserve them than a legitimate service that is significantly more user-friendly? It's a win-win situation, without a doubt; not to mention that when royalties go where they are supposed to go, artists and everyone involved with the production process gets an incentive to create more works?
Legitimate services bogged down with DRM cannot compete against p
Re:Guess what? (Score:2, Interesting)
These assholes just put the shit on the CD, DVD, whatever, and then fuck you over when you open it up and find out that you can't play the fucking thing. And you are an asshole for even suggesting otherwise.