One of my main drivers for downloading the RC was to install it on my home theatre machine. It's currently running XP Home with MediaPortal installed to take care of the UI and remote control functions. It works really well, and allows me to have all my mp3s, DVDs and other media stored on my main PC, and watch/listen to them all in the lounge. However, it's not without it's issues. Chief amongst them is it's very inconsistent DVD playback ability, and the fact that it takes a long time to load the (rather large, but not as large as some) mp3 folder across the network. And not to mention the grumpy old audio drivers that every time I rebuild it take me a couple of hours to get it to use the coax SPDIF output in any meaningful sense.
I've been thinking of upgrading both machines to Vista, and using the Vista Media Centre on the HTPC box. My concern with this plan was that the HTPC machine wouldn't have anywhere near enough grunt to run Vista acceptably. It's an old Athlon2400+, with 1Gb of DDR Ram, and a Nvidia 7600GS graphics card. The graphics card isn't very old, but the rest of the machine is around a 7yr vintage. Certainly not cutting edge. One option was to upgrade my main PC to a new Core i7 setup and move it's Core2Duo brains into the HTPC machine, but that was an $1100 option, and hence not very attractive. By using the Windows 7 RC install though, I had the chance to see how it would run on the old hardware, as well as try out the Media Centre functionality, all for free.
The Windows 7 install was a mixed bag. It took a VERY long time, but keep in mind this is on older hardware that it's really designed for. First time through the install failed when the machine rebooted to continue the install in Windows. An error about corrupted files had me doubting whether the download or subsequent burned DVD install media were corrupt. Restarting the install from scratch though saw it install perfectly fine, which was pleasing. I still don't know what caused the problems first time through - I certainly didn't do anything differently the second time.
The biggest surprise, and what impressed me the most, was that Win7 detected ALL the hardware in the old clunker. The weird old onboard sound with it's coax output - 100%. As soon as the machine booted, I had system noises coming out the big speakers via the Sony receiver. The 7600GS AGP graphics card - 100%. All features enabled, all ready to go, and the res set to the maximum that the plasma TV can handle on it's VGA input (1280x1024). The XP Media Centre remote and IR receiver - 100%. Including all buttons mapping through the main shell, so you can navigate around in Windows with the remote if you wanted to.
So very impressed with Windows 7 itself. It takes a good while to boot on the old machine, but once up and running, things happen quite quickly. You wouldn't want to use it as your every day machine, but for it's intended role, it's perfect.
However, this is where we start going downhill. I fired up Media Centre, and set it up. Music and Movie folders were pointed at the network shares on the main PC (which Vista had automatically discovered and knew about - much nicer than XP!). However, the following issues soon raised their heads:
- My mp3's are sorted into a standard folder structure - \\music\artist\album\files. As such, I've never payed much attention to ID3 tags, since I've always just navigated the folder structure that way, and played an album by playing all files in a folder. MC doesn't work like this. There's no way to make it view the files as they present on the disk. Everything is sorted by ID3 tags, which are either not present, or wrong. So there's a lot of fixing up needed there. But that's not really MCE's fault.
- Either due to the low spec of the HTPC machine, or the speed of the 100Mbps wired ethernet network, when you go into the Music Library in MC, the display will freeze up. It'll show the first page of albums, then freeze. Button presses on the remote control will eventually be processed, but after 5-6 mins. Basically, MC just locks up and goes non-responsive for an amount of time. No matter how long you leave it, it doesn't get better. I thought that MC worked off a local database that indexed and referenced the file shares, in the same way that Media Player on a PC does? Apparently not. Whilst MediaPortal would take a couple of minutes, then eventually read all the remote files, Media Centre just seems to get itself in a knot, and locks up completely.
- There's no way to play netradio in Media Centre? There's a Radio option, but it tells me I need an FM tuner to listen to radio. This is a big one for me, as I like listening to international netradio on a Saturday morning whilst doing chores around the house.
- Media Centre doesn't seem to be able to stay on top. Often, after resuming from an overzealous screensaver, Media Centre had dropped from the foreground app, which left the remote control operating on the Win7 Start Menu and seemingly unable to get back down to the task bar. Thinking it would be smart enough to pick up the running instance, I had no choice but to click on the Media Centre icon on the Start Menu. Unfortunately it wasn't that smart, and so then I had two instances of Media Centre running on the one PC, which only a reboot could straighten out.
They're the main issues. Nothing wrong with Windows 7 at this point - it's just Media Centre that's playing up. I don't know whether it's the old hardware that's at fault, or if it's the network playing up. But at this point in time, Media Centre looks to be a bit of a bust. It's too inconsistent, it's too flakey in it's operation, and it just plain doesn't work with my mp3s across the network.
In it's defence, I did like :
- DVD playback. Playing back a DVD that had been ripped to the main PC across the network was bliss. No need to muck around with installing DVD decoders, no need to change the decoder to a special one that came with the DVD drive's software to avoid stuttering, anything like that. Point it at the DVD, and it plays. no mess, no fuss. Love that.
- Coverart. Media Centre seems to play much nicer with the coverart for CDs that have been ripped to mp3s. It just works, which is nice.
- Music - playing a CD. When you can manage to get it working with a folder of mp3's ripped from a CD, I love how you simply "click" on the album with the remote, and the list of tracks opens up in a new window, with a handy "play all" button. And the new "Now Playing" screen with the coverart in the background is beautiful.
- TV integration. This is not something I've played with yet, but I want to invest in a dual digital tuner card at some stage in the near future, and record TV that I'd like to watch. Even though I couldn't actually try it out, Media Centre impressed me with it's deep integration of TV services, EPGs, burn to disc or convert to iPod/PMP formats. I suspect that this alone might bring me back to Media Centre in the future.
For now though, I'm experimenting with a hybrid setup. I wanted music to play in the background for the mother's day brunch we had at our place, and MC wasn't working. So I quickly installed Media Portal on Win7, and that worked fine. I've not tried playing a DVD or anything, but at least I can see my mp3 folders, and can play an album, and it all works. I've still got some bugs to iron out, such as clicking the "Home" button on the remote inside MediaPortal actually launches a new running copy of Media Centre, instead of taking me back to the MediaPortal home screen. And the Back key on the remote doesn't work. And the music vis doesn't work anymore, by the looks of things.
So it's still a bit of a dogs breakfast, so to speak. I'm going to try to sort it out this week by removing Media Centre from the installation, and seeing if I can get MediaPortal playing nicely on the Win7 RC base. I hope so, because the device integration and support of Win7 is excellent. Whilst it takes longer to boot than the previous XP install, I feel it's snappier once loaded, and the networking seems rock solid. So I want to persevere with Win7, if at all possible. Hopefully once MC is uninstalled, MediaPortal will take full control of the remote, and assign all it's keys back to itself, and we'll be rocking and rolling.
There's still some things about MediaPortal I don't like - it's still slow to open up the Music share across the network, for instance. However, I think it's probably the best of a bad bunch for my needs. I did consider using XBMC, but it has no support for recording TV, which is a definite contender in the near future. MediaPortal has quite robust TV support, but I suspect it's not as slick or as polished and integrated as Media Centre is.
So we shall see. In the meantime though, the score is firmly planted at :
Windows 7 : 1
Windows XP : 0
and
Windows Media Centre : 0
MediaPortal : 1 (just 'cause it, you know, actually kinda works)
(Bootnote - after having this blog set up for ages, and not actually using it for work purposes [despite having half a dozen half-finished articles written in draft], I've decided to use this as my technology-specific blog. It'll be my nerd corner, as opposed to a strictly work-related blog. So expect to see articles such as this, which is clearly home-based, intermingled with interesting tid bits taken from my day to day wranglings with technology in a SME environment. Hope it's interesting!)
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