A few weeks back, I wrote about one of my experiences with Windows Media Center under Windows Vista RC2. I had decided to upgrade my home theater PC system from Windows Media Center 2005 to Windows Vista RC2 and man.. it was excruciating. Problems I ran into included:

  • Network driver issues
  • Serial ATA RAID controller driver issues
  • ATI graphics drivers issues
  • MPEG2 decoder performance issues

In two words - NOT FUN. Now that Microsoft has released the final edition of Windows Vista - would my overall experience change? Now to be fair, I did have a pretty good experience with Windows Media Center under RC2 on a different box in the office but unfortunately that experience wasn’t consistent everywhere else. Today, we’ll finally take a look at Windows Media Center in the final version (RTM) of Vista released to MSDN this past weekend.

The initial install

With my fingers crossed and a little prayer uttered in my mind, I went ahead and installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my HTPC. I won’t go into too much detail with the actual installation process. If you’re interested in knowing more about that, please refer to my upcoming Vista article on installing the OS. However, I will highlight several things that I think are important here - many of which might be specific to my system alone. I’ll break it down by the components in my system.

AOpen i855GMEm-LFS motherboard

Under RC2, I had trouble with the SATA RAID controller and the Marvell NIC controller of my AOpen i855GMEm-LFS motherboard. With the final release of Vista, the problems that I had with the Marvell NIC interfaces were eliminated. I was able to successfully get onto my network as well as onto the Internet.

I unfortunately did not get a chance to test out the onboard SATA RAID controller but that’ll be on my list of to do’s for one of these days coming up.

Sound

I initially removed the Creative Audigy 2 sound card in favor of the motherboard’s on board sound - mostly because Creative had not released final Vista certified sound drivers at this moment. However, after tinkering with the system for the better part of the day, I opted to go back to the Audigy 2 card and work with the beta drivers.

Graphics

The video card on my system was an aging ATI Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card which has served me well over the last three years but yes - it was indeed aging. Yet the card served me well under Windows Media Center 2005 so I was still hoping that would be the case for Windows Vista and Windows Media Center under Vista.

Vista installed perfectly fine with whatever default drivers were loaded with the DVD. However, I decided to install the latest drivers from the ATI website here and they seemed to work just as well.

TV Tuners

My analog tuner was an Hauppauge card which Vista detected automatically and installed the appropriate drivers for. Unfortunately Vista did not install drivers for my AVerMedia A180 card so that meant I had to go out and find the appropriate Vista drivers. Luckily AVerMedia had Vista drivers on their website - Version 3.5.0.37 for anyone interested. These installed without a hitch and the HDTV tuner card (A180) was up and running after a reboot.

Initial Media Center woes

At this point, Windows Vista was fully installed and everything appeared to be in working order. The first order of business was to setup Windows Media Center. I won’t bore you with the details of setting up WMC since you should all pretty know the process by now. If you think you’d like to see Windows Media Center setup, please let me know and I’ll be happy to write an article about it.

Once I had both tuners configured, I went ahead and tried out live TV. If you remember from my previous article, I had stuttering problems with live TV - especially with HDTV stations. Would this be the case here? My first test was to try out the analog tuner - no problems here.

My second test was to try and play back some HD channels over the AVerMedia card. What did I find? STUTTERING GALORE!! Yikes. However it should be noted that this stuttering was different than my experiences under RC2. Under RC2, I had stuttering every six seconds or so. Here in the final edition, live video was stuttering throughout. 

I did cross my fingers right? Well apparently not hard enough!

Here begins my long debugging process.

Step 1: Look at the CPU utilization

Why was the HDTV picture stuttering? Could it be that the built in Microsoft MPEG-2 decoder was crushing my Pentium M processor and also not using any hardware video acceleration? To check this, I ran Media Center within a window and began playback of an HD stream. Task Manager showed me CPU utilization in the high 95 percentile range - that’s definitely much higher than under Windows Media Center 2005. Hmm something just wasn’t right here. It certainly seemed that the Microsoft MPEG-2 decoder wasn’t making use of the hardware somehow.

Step 2: Try out different MPEG-2 decoders

This is where the fun really began folks. I tried out a number of MPEG-2 decoders including:

Using Gary Whittaker’s excellent Vista Media Center Decoder utility, I swapped out Microsoft’s MPEG-2 decoder with each of the above MPEG-2 decoders except for WinDVD which could not be found for some reason (perhaps WinDVD no longer ships an MCE MPEG-2 decoder?)

In any case, I did try out the NVIDIA decoder and the PowerDVD decoder with the VMCD utility. Once the decoder was in place, I restarted Windows Media Center and found that the HDTV playback was MUCH MUCH better. The stuttering was gone and so my problems were fixed right? Well not so fast.

I switched channels to HBO which was being captured from my set top box (STB) - no problems there either at first. The video quality was good and not a single hint of stuttering was to be found. However, things changed within 15 seconds. With both PowerDVD and NVIDIA PureDecoder in place, my live feed froze after 15 seconds. I saw a brief notication that the content was restricted content and as such I was not able to view it on this computer. WHAT THE HELL?? I switched back to the built in Microsoft MPEG-2 decoder and I could play back the HBO channel.

I tried another scenario where I only replaced the video decoder with the third party MPEG2 decoder but that didn’t help either. For now, it appeared that Vista needed to have the Microsoft MPEG-2 decoder in place in order to watch “restricted content” such as shows on HBO. Of course by using the Microsoft decoder, I would not be able to watch my HDTV channels.

Step 3: Look at the ATI drivers

Perhaps the problem could be resolved by the ATI drivers? I tried out all sorts of settings to no avail. The stuttering was here to stay. There were occasional instances where certain HD channels played back without a problem. In particular, I had no problems with ABC in HD but all sorts of problems with CBS and NBC in HD.

Step 4: Perhaps the hardware is just outdated?

Since I really wanted to be able to play back HBO shows - either recorded or live, I thought perhaps my ATI 9700 Pro card was just not up to snuff anymore. Perhaps Microsoft failed to implement any hardware optimizations for the 9700 - I just simply didn’t know nor could I find any information on this (although there were plenty of people who had stuttering issues with RC1/RC2 versions of Vista and ATI graphics cards in general).

So I decided to take yet another trip to BestBuy and pick up a new graphics card. I almost got an NVIDIA graphics card but I decided to opt for an ATI X1600 Pro graphics card with 512MB of RAM. If it didn’t work - no problems. I could simply return it back to BestBuy and get my money back.

I replaced the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro card with the new ATI Radeon X1600 Pro card and then installed the latest ATI Radeon Vista drivers. Once the drivers were installed and my system rebooted, I proceeded to try out live HDTV.. (fingers were doubly crossed now!)

What do you know? HD playback was fine now. There was a slight stutter on some channels right in the beginning but everything smoothed out within a second or so. It appeared that the Microsoft MPEG-2 decoder did in fact like my ATI Radeon X1600 Pro graphic card.

I wanted to double check my CPU utilization while playing back HD channels, and it was still pretty darn high (it actually fluctuates between 75-90 percent at times) but it was still less than before. Alright.. I could live with that for now.

Everything else is actually OK

With that fixed, I could finally focus in on the rest of Windows Media Center under Windows Vista.. and you know what? It’s really pretty good (though there are some minor issues). Let’s take a look at Vista Media Center and see what it has to offer shall we?

Media Center Start

As most of you know, Media Center under Vista sports a fresh new look that’s optimized for widescreen viewers. The new UI continues the twist like interface that we’ve seen before in Portable Media Center devices as well as the Microsoft Zune.

If you look at the Start screen for Media Center, you’ll see major menu options lined up vertically and tasks for each option listed horizontally.

The main Start menu items for Vista includes the following (from top down)

  • Pictures + Video
  • Music
  • Now Playing + Queue
  • TV + Movies
  • Online Media
  • Tasks

As I mentioned before, within each Start menu item, you can select several different tasks to perform. Let’s look over the major sections:

Pictures + Video

The pictures category and the video category were combined under Windows Vista into a single category. You have three sub menu options that you can choose from here.

  • Picture Library - Here’s a snapshot of my Picture Library. You can sort by folders, tags you’ve assigned to your images, and by when the pictures were taken.

  • Play All - This means exactly what it sounds like - you can see all of the media played back in a slideshow manner
  • Video Library - Here’s a snapshot of the Video library. Similar to the Picture Library, you can view items by folder or when the videos were taken. There’s no tagging feature as of yet for videos. I typically stream video content from a networked storage location to my home theater PC. Works beautifully!

Windows Media Center makes heavy use of thumbnails under Vista and you can easily see this in action when it comes to photographs and videos. Thumbnail rectangles are laid out in a three row by multiple column method when viewed in “View Large” mode. Here’s a snapshot of this in action under the Video Library

 

Music

The Music menu options provides the following sub menu items:

  • Music Library - Music library is a section which fully utilizes the twist user interface. The horizontal menu items under the Music Library include different view options such as:
    • Albums
    • Artists
    • Genres
    • Songs
    • Playlists
    • Composers
    • Years
    • Album Artists

Within each view option, you’ll see results of the view below the menu in a nice convenient laid out manner. When you’re viewing by albums, you can also see the album thumbnails in a rectangular laid out fashion - similar to the Pictures + Video library section.  You can even change the view from list to small to finally large.

 

As before, you can also jump to a specific title by typing the title name within the user interface.

One annoying thing - I still think it’s pretty difficult to rate a song. You need to click on a song and edit the information pertaining to that song - not an effective means if you’d like to mass update lists of songs.

  • Play All - Play All randomly selects songs from your library for playback
  • Radio - If you have a radio tuner installed, you can seek to your station using this UI. Find a station you like? Simply add that station as a preset and have the preset show up in this horizontal menu list

 

  • Search - This menu item brings up the familiar numeric keypad based search that you normally see under the TV guide section. It’s used here to help you find music in your collection - especially useful if you’ve got LOADS of albums and you don’t want to deal with the thumbnails. Here’s an example of a search on the word “era” which brings up results for Erasure (which is what I was looking for) categorized by Album, and by Artist. We’re looking for the Artist of course but you get my drift. The search feature is definitely going to be a feature I’ll be using.

Now Playing (+ Queue)

As the name implies, the Now Playing + Queue section shows you what’s currently playing on your Media Center. No matter where you are, you can always go back to the Start Menu and see what’s happening on your system at this point in time,.

TV + Movies

The sub menus for TV + Movies includes:

  • Recorded TV - Within Recorded TV, you view all the shows and movies you’ve recorded up until this point. You can also view upcoming schedule shows via this section. Media Center makes heavy use of the widescreen display by heavily using horizontal layouts of thumbnails. You can view content by date recorded and by the title of the shows. You can also view your content in eithe View List or View Large mode. Unlike in the Music Library, both views show thumbnails of the shows. You will probably use View List if you have a large number of recorded television shows. This will help you squeeze more content on a given display.

 

  • Live TV - Live TV is exactly that - you get to see what is currently live on your tuner(s)
  • Guide - The guide is pretty much the same as in MCE 2005 so there’s not much to talk about here. There is that nice video overlay feature which allows you to view the guide or menu while it’s overlayed on an active video stream. This gives you an idea of what’s still going on in your video feed while also using the guide interface.

  • Movies Guide - This section specifically shows us what movies are currently available via the electronic program guide for your television stations. You get a neat thumbnail layout of movies that are coming up. Yup - As you can tell, Vista is heavy on the graphics.

  • Play DVD - What can I say? it plays the DVD in your drive if you’ve got one there.
  • Search - Search is the same as before except it now has a place in the Start menu (smart considering how often a user actually ends up using it to schedule shows and what not)

Online Media

Online Media has only one sub menu option right now  and it’s the Program Library. When you go into Programs Library, you’ll see all your various Windows Media Center programs laid out according to categories. The old MCE 2005 applications are not found here - sorry - won’t see VH1 or MTV applets here anymore.. at least not yet. Right now, the only things available are some Media Center based games.

Tasks

Tasks is the last main menu item under the Start section of Windows Media Center. From here, you have the following options:

  • Settings - These are the general settings you’re probably familiar with. You can rerun setup, change your guide options, optimize your display preferences, change your storage locations etc.
  • Shutdown - Here you can choose five different tasks - Close, Log Off, Shut Down, Restart, and Sleep.
  • Burn CD/DVD - Here you can burn your media onto an optical disc
  • Sync - If you have a portable media player such as the Toshiba Gigabeat S, you can synchronize the content on your system with the player.
  • Add Extender - Here you can add Media Center Extender units to your OS (such as the Xbox 360)
  • Media Only - Media Only is a new feature under Media Center which removes the mimize and close buttons from the application. This is a great feature for those of you who never leave the Windows Media Center UI. For my HTPC needs, I’ll enable it! You can always exit the media only option.

Overall

I’ve been using Windows Vista for most of this year now and thus I’ve seen nearly all of the changes that Microsoft made to Windows Media Center. Compared to where things stood at Beta 2, the final version of Vista and of Media Center is extremely stable. Switching between Media Center and the OS no longer crashes Media Center. Video playback is fairly smooth under the right harware requirements and hardware/software interactions appear to be relatively stable. Are things perfect? Not at all but things could be worse right? I’ve broken down my observations into a simple good and bad categorization. Yes it’s indeed simplistic but it works for now.

The good…

Let’s go over the good parts of Windows Media Center in Windows Vista that I’ve run across thus far (note - this isn’t a comprehensive list so if you can think of other good things, please do comment!)

  • Better support for widescreen displays. Windows Media Center’s new twist style user interface makes much better use of widescreen displays. Menu items are displayed horizontally and vertically - making better and more extensive use of your desktop real estate space.
  • Overlay menus on top of live TV or video - One of the coolest new (although arguably unnecessary) capabilities is the menu overlay on top of a live video or television feed. Simply watch a television show, and press the Start button. The menu will be rendered on top of the video with the menu slightly translucent to show the live video beneath it.
  • Thumbnails galore. You’ll be able to preview a great deal of your content via thumbnails. Navigate your music collection by visually looking at the album covers. See what television shows to watch based on a thumbnail image of the show
  • Built in decoder - Microsoft finally builds in an MPEG-2 decoder into the product. Good stuff - users no longer have to acquire a third party decoder to install on their MCE system. But this is only a partially good thing…
  • Media Only mode - If you just want to stay within the MCE environment, now you can by removing the minimize and close buttons. The Windows desktop is still there - you just can’t see it anymore
  • Built in support for media center extenders such as the Xbox 360. You no longer need to download additional software to make extenders work
  • Built in CableCard support though we could not test that at all
  • Seeking through music titles is faster now. The new Music Search feature was sorely needed.

The bad (or better known as not so good)..

  • Resource hog - Windows Media Center can be a bit of a resource hog - especially in conjunction with Windows Aero running simultaneously. Factor in recording and playing back HDTV streams, and you’ll get a system that can be a bit slow at times - especially if you’re not using the latest and greatest processors. Consider disabling Windows Aero if you don’t need that graphics layer.
  • Driver support varies - Let’s face it. When it comes to setting up a good Windows Media Center, it still boils down to getting the right hardware with the right drivers. Before upgrading to Windows Vista, make sure your current hardware comes with Vista device drivers (if not final release, then at the very least some beta drivers). Remember folks. The OS is fresh out of the box. Nuff said
  • After a reboot, my HD tuner will always fail to pick up a signal on the first try of an HD channel. If I try a different HD channel after that, it works. I simply have no answers to this one as of yet.
  • Built in MPEG-2 decoder. While Microsoft took one step forward by adding in an MPEG-2 decoder, they took about three steps back at the same time. Why? Let me count thy reasons:
    • You need the decoder to view restricted content channels such as HBO. Welcome to DRM in the new world
    • Yes you can swap out the decoder with third party decoders but that means you won’t be able to watch restricted content. This might change in the future - we just don’t know
    • The decoder doesn’t appear to be optimized to fully use hardware video acceleration.
  • Where’s my MTV and VH1 applications? Yes. I miss them.
  • It could be me.. but video playback - especially of analog video seems a bit grainer than before. It could be because of the default Vista drivers that I’m using for my Hauppauge tuner so we’ll see.

So there you have it - my initial look into the Windows Media Center application under the final release of Windows Vista.

I thought I’d end this article by providing you a video walkthrough of the new Vista OS. Might be interesting to see how things have changed right?

 

Summary

After years of development, Vista is finally here and with that, a new version of Windows Media Center. The latest version of Media Center comes with several enhancements - many of which are user interface related. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again - one of the best user interfaces for home theater PC’s got even better (and yes I’m sure that will spark some debates here). Widescreen display users will love the twist user interface with menu items listed both vertically and horizontally across the screen. Thumbnails are extensively and effectively used throughout the application making it easier to preview media. Viewing videos with menu overlays is a cool feature which allows you to watch the action will performing other tasks. Overall - the user interface is just simple and intuitive - something not usually associated to Microsoft products.

On the feature front, Vista introduces CableCard support but unfortunately for now - you’ll only be able to enjoy such support by purchasing a new HTPC system from a system vendor. CableCard will allow for direct support for cable based high definition content through Windows Media Center. I’m still waiting to see if ATI will release the OCUR product for retail customers (heck.. I haven’t heard a single thing about this product since earlier this year).

Life isn’t all pretty of course with the new OS. The changes to the user interface also comes with a price apparently - especially for older systems. Vista is a resource hog. If you have an older graphics card and you’re considering a move to Vista, definitely consider getting a new beefier graphics card. Dual core processor upgrades will also undoubtedly help performance.

Driver support for Vista is also shaky at times. Driver quality and support varies from device to device which could make life a living hell for Windows Media Center users.

Finally, what’s up with the built in MPEG-2 decoder? It needs to either have better hardware acceleration support or Microsoft needs to allow third party decoders to be used instead. The restricted content is a pain in the b*tt too but there’s not much we can do about that these days.

So the final verdict?

If you’re happy with your current Windows Media Center 2005 system, then you might be better served waiting out the upgrade for now. Yes there are improvements to the OS and to the application but there are several bumps in the road that need to be ironed out. Life is certainly better than the RC1 and RC2 days but it’s not quite perfect. However, if you’re looking to stay on the bleeding edge of technology, go ahead and dive right in. However, you’ll probably want the very latest in hardware - especially graphics and CPUs.

Finally, where can you find Windows Media Center with Windows Vista? Remember that Media Center is no longer it’s own product SKU but rather a part of Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. Most new home PC owners will get Home Premium while some may even opt for Vista Ultimate. Whichever OS you get, it’s clear that Media Center will find itself in many more systems than ever before.

 

UPDATE (11/22/2006)

It’s been a few days since I ran the full install and I wanted to provide an update to the original article.

  • A loss of signal via the DVI port causes a crash in the latest ATI device driver from ATI’s website. Here’s what happens. I’ll turn off my TV (which is what I normally do when I’m about to go to bed mind you) and later on - turn the set back on. When the set comes back, Vista pukes .. actually the ATI device driver pukes. This causes Windows Media Center to crash and burn as well. If I swap out the latest ATI drivers with the shipped drivers from Vista, life is good again but..
  • Live TV stuttering comes back.. but it’s much more subtle than ever before.
  • Did I mention to turn off Windows Aero? I think I did.. That helps to speed things up and reduce stutter
  • For those curious - Windows Vista does indeed recognize the Xbox 360 HD DVD player - to a certain point. It still wants drivers for two memory units within the player but the OS will read the contents of an HD DVD disc once you hook the drive up to the OS. More on this later on as soon as I can get my hands on an HD DVD software player

That’s it for now.. but I’ll update as I discover more things.

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