The Engineer Behind Microsoft's TV Strategy

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "A high-energy engineer named Joe Belfiore, age 37, has led Microsoft's Media Center team for four years. The effort has gained momentum in the past year, the Wall Street Journal reports, bolstering Microsoft's defense against a challenge from Apple's Front Row for control of home-entertainment software. 'The Apple threat seems menacing, in part because of recent history: Its iPod was a late entry in an established field of digital music players but soon stole the lion's share of the market,' the WSJ writes. At Microsoft, Front Row is already causing ripples: [Bill] Gates in an email to Mr. Belfiore asked why Apple's remote control had just six buttons. The standard Media Center remote from Microsoft has 39 buttons. (Mr. Belfiore's explanation: Front Row computers don't have TV or digital video recorder functions and thus don't need as many buttons.) At stake is more than just another piece of software for home computers. Both companies, and others, are trying to build the foundational technology for all home digital entertainment.'"

Re:the unspoken battle

[User 956]

Except the mac mini is specifically lacking everything it needs to completely own the home theatre space - quality A/V outputs.

The DVI output on the mac mini is a high quality output which is found on a wide variety of modern TVs [google.com]. If your TV doesn't have that, Apple sells a DVI->Svideo adapter [apple.com] for the mac mini. Apple's competing on this front, they're just weirdly silent about it.

why do they bother?

[penguin-collective]

I bought a Media Center PC; I found the UI to be mediocre, and after a few months, things gradually stopped working (as it received more and more patches and hotfixes). I eventually installed Linux and it works a lot better now. I also have used a Mac with a TV card, and I also find it a lot nicer than Media Center.

Re:the unspoken battle

[User 956]

Yes, but no S/PDIF! What the hell are they thinking?! I've never bought an Apple, but I probably will when the release a mini with a freakin' TOSLINK port.

Is $35 too expensive? [beststuff.co.uk]

Seriously, I'm no Apple fan, but everything they're doing with respect to the mini just *screams* home media device. And from their strategy with the ipod, you can bet that they'll slowly integrate the most-requested features into the actual product, and leave the less-requested features available as addons from third parties. If there's one thing Apple knows how to do, it's doing market research.

Re:the unspoken battle

[assassinator42]

1. The 360 can't even play video if you don't have Windows Media Center. 2. Even with Media Center, the 360 can't play certain codecs, such as DivX/Xvid and AVC. 3. The 360 apparently doesn't conform to the "media renderer" standard for playing back music and photos from a PC. I believe it also has limited audio codecs for playing back music during games. Honestly, xbox media center for the original xbox is probably better at playing media than the 360.

Re:Mac Mini + Front Row

[FireFury03]

and it would be nice to have full Tivo-like capabilities from my PC

Can I take this opportunity to point at MythTV [mythtv.org]. I've been using it for several years and it's still better than the systems the sat and cable operators are providing here in the UK. I was stuck using my parent's NTL Digital system at Christmas and realised just how much functionality I take for granted in Myth which just isn't there in the NTL system. Similarly I hear friends commenting about features they wished Sky+ had and they're always things that Myth has already been doing for ages.

Admittedly there are a few bugs that neet to be mopped up in Myth but on the whole it's a good project. I think the only thing I'd really like to be able to do that I can't already do is use a satellite tuner in my myth box instead of re-encoding the S-Video output from my Sky box. (Yes, Myth does support DVB-S cards, but getting a DVB-S card with a common interface is very pricey still and since Sky won't produce a VideoGuard CAM I'd be stuck using an illegal programmable CAM such as the DragonCAM - total cost, £100 for the card, £50 for the common interface and £80 for the CAM == way too pricey)