Posts Tagged ‘Media Center’

Below is an email I sent that I’ve modified just a bit to fit a discussion that’s been coming up pretty regularly. This email was in response to a thread that was started about how the Apple TV is doing, it was sent before the Boxee / Hulu removal announcement though that news doesn’t really change any of this post for me.

FWIW, I honestly think a lot of the sales this quarter were thanks to Boxee Alpha/Beta which quite frankly rocks on the Apple TV. I wouldn’t buy an Apple TV, but would now thanks to Boxee even in its early stages.

While Apple TV may only have ~400-500K units, I’m pretty sure every one of those users is using it as intended with a TV. On the other hand, Media Center has shipped what? 20M+ units last I remember seeing from the banners… But that’s just counting SKU’s that contained Media Center correct? Microsoft shouldn’t be concerned with that number when comparing, Microsoft should be looking at the number of users actually using the app and using TV. Usage data for the number of WMC PC’s connected to TV’s? Data for the number of unique guide downloads… IIRC it’s a heck of a lot closer to 500K than 20M .

Personally, when I moved to West Seattle I completely dropped all cable services and vowed not to pay Comcast again [except for my business Internet]. OCUR was great, it really was. Despite the royal pain the setup process was, thanks to Comcast’s inexperience with the technology, afterwards it was great and ran smoothly for me. At the end of the day though it just wasn’t worth the monthly service fees. And heck, I could only do OCUR because I was internal, not because I spent another $1K+ on a brand new PC. So the fallback would then become a tuner with NTSC/ATSC/QAM… Like many OEM’s are doing, I personally skipped over the TV Pack and went right to 7 so it’s only now that I could get digital content easily. Up until now though if I wanted to use Media Center as my TV source, as a normal consumer, I’d have to be using two clunky STB’s in combo with a dual tuner and the IR blasters and all that other junk. Not very elegant…

So like the growing few, I dumped the cable and bumped up my business Internet service speeds. $65/mo for 12/2Mbps… I use Hulu, Netflix, Joost, network sites, MTV, you name it. Combine that with P2P and there’s really no need to ever go back to cable. The one thing that makes me sad, really sad, is that Media Center doesn’t fit into this new TV ecosystem. It’s only now with 7 that it’s becoming a bit more compelling for users who don’t use tuners. Internet content through MSN and such is great but where’s the MCML from Hulu, Netflix, and all those? Where’s the rich metadata for my downloaded content? Where’s the social aspects as well?

One thing Boxee has done and done really well is create an experience around the way people use downloaded and online media making it incredibly easy to dump the wire. What really got me was when I loaded up Boxee the second day. I went in to watch some of the Arrested Development that auto downloaded via RSS. It parsed the share and sorted each show, then under that each season, then under that each episode. What’s more the thumb for every episode is perfect (see screenshot). Going to more for the episode pulls up complete metadata. All it had to go on was TVArrested Development310 – Fakin’ It.avi there’s no other metadata, no XML files, no album art in the folder. It does this for my MKV movies too, MoviesWALL-EWALL-E.mkv and sure enough it has the art and metadata, no DVDID.xml, no pain.

Yes Boxee is Alpha, no, it doesn’t have any of the amazingly hard work that went into making it compatible with the multitude of tuners. It has a lot of usability and stability issues, it’s not gone through as many iterations as Media Center so it’s not as refined. But man, for an Alpha it’s bloody awesome, I highly suggest getting the Windows Alpha asap and give it a honest go, set up uTorrent with RSS, see if you could make the switch to a cableless life and live on the bleeding edge.

Honestly, I’ve loved Media Center since the days when it was only Freestyle. I supported it as a MVP for 6 years, 3 years on the eHome beta team, and will continue to support it. I’m just a bit bummed out by the fact that Media Center has failed to deliver on features that have been asked for since 2002. What is Microsoft going to do to remain competitive when Boxee goes mainstream and releases STB devices like the Apple TV? I’m happy to see the start of Internet content via MSN but where are the third party deals with the providers that people use now?

When I was sitting for 4 hours in Las Vegas International for Snowpocalypse 2008 to allow my plane to arrive; I busted out the iPhone, connected to the free WiFi, downloaded Joost and started watching The Fifth Element for free. It wasn’t a big TV and it wasn’t HD, but honestly it didn’t matter. I had the content and the experience was awesome and easy. How is Media Center going to deliver that same grin on people’s faces when the predominant source of content is the Internet and third party services?

So there you have it… My little rant about why Media Center doesn’t fit me anymore. Writing this and discussing it further later made me realize that there’s actually nothing really wrong with Media Center at all, for your every day average person it’s great. Sure it could be a little simpler to get going like TiVo but as far as the ultimate experience, Media Center is definitely it. This will continue to be true so long as TV and movies continue to be delivered the way everyone has received this content for years. However I personally believe that as more people realize that dumping the wire is easy the trend to only use the Internet will continue. Plus to make things more interesting, analog broadcasts won’t necessarily continue from all the cable providers. They could very well move them over to encrypted QAM as far as I know. If this were to happen you’d need to rent a fugly STB for each tuner you planned on using. Even less elegant.

I realized that I’m just way ahead of the curve. I was watching TV on my PC with an old BT848 Hauppauge tuner back in 1997 then tried but failed to use WinTV. Then I used Media Center before it was Media Center, then OCUR came and went. Now I’ve completely ditched TV altogether and only stream with the Internet. If the past is any indication the wave should finally catch up with me in another 3 to 5 years, what I’ll be doing at that point is anybody’s guess.

My friend Mike over at Missing Remote came up with a little app to help integrate Boxee with Media Center. I helped him test it after another MVP, Andrew Cherry helped perfect it. I question whether Media Center is even needed with Boxee though, at least as long as I don’t use cable TV.

For the second time in the last 4 years I’ve gone without TV. Since June I’ve only used online services to gather my TV content. Hulu, combined with Netflix, and a little EZTV has made it an extremely easy transition. Because of this and because of frustration getting Media Center to *fit the way I* consume and want to view all this content.

Since I’m no longer using a TV tuner there’s really no need to use it at all. As I said before, despite being Alpha, Boxee shows a lot of promise and is deliverying on things I’ve been waiting for in Media Center for the past 6 years. Example, thumbnails that actually work from the TV and movie content, integration with almost every online service I use, magical absorbition of my organized content despite the lack of any real metadata in the files, and so much more…

Even in Windows 7 I’m still wishing for most of the features boxee offers. It’s really something else. For now though it’s kind of nice using Boxee with Media Center after adding Mike’s app.

It may only be Alpha but it’s got everything that’s missing from Media Center. I can browse and use all the online services that Media Center ignores. It works with EVERY file format that I care about, it takes in every format I care about. It automagically gathers metadata for every format I care about. How I’m not quite sure. At any rate, I’ve got my media organized as such: \RELATIVITYMediaVideos under that there’s TV and Movies. Under that I’ve got each movie in its own folder. I also have each TV series in its own folder with episodes titled 101 – Title.mkv as an example. In Media Center I have to have an xml file for each along with a Folder.jpg for things to appear right. In Boxee it just greps the folder and file to figure things out and pull the data.

Does this work? Yes. Is it perfect? No. However it’s exactly what I’ve been feeling like I’ve been missing from Media Center. I gave it every network path to all my media and it’s all in there and it’s all quite fast. Every movie has album art and reviews and more. Every TV series shows all the episodes I have along with the art, the episode name, synopsis and more.

Going to the Internet content for Music or Videos that’s even more amazing. It has access to most of  the sites I use, Hulu, MTV, Joost, NPR,  Last.fm. Content is actually easy to find and obtain the experience is pretty damned seemless between each service. I don’t even know where or how it gets all this, in the first 30 minutes I don’t even care, it just works.

I need to get to bed now, but let me just say this. Boxee isn’t perfect, it lacks the Microsoft and Apple quality and management control, however this also opens and frees it from those controls and allows it to be so much more than either company could allow. The fact it works with so many online services and works with P2P content natively is a testament to this fact. The downside is that there are bugs left and right at least while running the client on build 7000 of Win 7. The user interface controls are clumsy and nowhere near as refined or intituitive as Media Center in 7. That being said it’d be a toss up between the two as for which one I’d use on a 10′ level. Why? Despite the effortless use of WMC it doesn’t work entertain me the way Boxee does. I installed Boxee and only Boxee, gave it my paths and it works with 100% of my content the way it already existed. I didn’t need to conform to its standards.

Now the part the folks in WMC should be worried about… Boxee may only be Alpha  and is super buggy, but it delivers on many fronts. And get this, it’s based on XBMC. XBMC was included in  Google’s summer of code for 2008, it may be a stretch, but Google is indirectly helping fund the progression of this project.

In my personal view it is a leap ahead of WMC. Why? IMHO, broadcast TV services like Blu-Ray will succumb online distribution. It won’t happen in the next 3 years, maybe not even in the next 5 but combined with online advertising and the continued shifts in the marketplace it will become more and more mainstream. Sites like Hulu, NetFlix streaming, and YouTube all show people care less about the HDness of their content and more about the ease of access to the content they care about. Not to mention the fact I doubt many people could tell NetFlix and a SD DVD apart viewing it side by side on a 40″ LCD. At any rate, I digress. The point of this paragraph is to say that TV tuners and the technological understanding required by WMC thanks to TV standards and digital TV requirements make it difficult choice for any geek requiring that GFAF/WAF.

Boxee does cater towards those that don’t bother with Comcast or DirecTV and instead choose free and legal Internet sources along with legally questionable P2P sources. This is something that Microsoft will never do at least with regards to the latter option. I think usage statistics will show the latter option is important to the masses including Mom’s and Pop’s.

Anyway, I guess that’s it for now. There’s more digging to be done. And damn it, I keep hitting the key and Boxee keeps pissing me off. Where’s Win 7 WMC usage when I need it.