Contrary to me my friend wanted to use Windows at the base of his HTPC. Essentially this left us with two options: The open source MediaPortal or Vistas Media Center. While undisputedly having fewer features the latter promised to be simpler to set up, use and maintain.
One of the features I love about MythTV is that you can always hit the record button on the remote when watching a show and it will record the entire buffer which means you end up with a recording that contains everything since you started watching that particular channel. Even in the Windows 7 beta you still cannot do that.
The editions
Media Center only comes bundled with the Home Premium and the Ultimate edition. The price difference for the OEM version is only marginal and we might end up being lucky to have one of the features that only Vista Ultimate provides. Especially Remote Desktop and Complete PC Backup and Restore come to mind.
comparison chart
| SOURCE WIKIPEDIA.ORG | HOME PREMIUM | ULTIMATE |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Retail & OEM Licensing | Retail & OEM Licensing |
| Running application limit | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Desktop Window Manager | Yes | Yes |
| Windows Aero | Yes | Yes |
| Windows Movie Maker | Yes | Yes |
| Windows Media Center | Yes | Yes |
| Premium games | Yes | Yes |
| Joining Windows Server domains | No | Yes |
| Remote Desktop Host | No | Yes |
| Group Policy | No | Yes |
| BitLocker | No | Yes |
| MUI Language Packs | No | Yes |
| Windows Ultimate Extras | No | Yes |
| Complete PC Backup and Restore | No | Yes |
Because some of the codecs and add on apps are still only available in a 32bit version, we dropped 64bit support and some 500MB RAM in favour of better support. In a years time things may look different though.
Bluray support
Bluray support for Windows comes in two flavours: Cyberlinks PowerDVD Ultra and ArcSofts Total Media Theater. But only the latter offered decent Media Center integration. PowerDVD places a link in Media Center but launches an external program. Not quite what you expect from a $100.- software package. This has changed very recently with the release of PowerDVD 9 that adds a native UI for Media Center. I guess the two are on par again…
TotalMedia Theater also allows you to reencode the new lossless audio formats on the fly to be outputted via S/P DIF; nice if you don’t have the latest receiver yet.
Interestingly ArcSoft only delivered a boxed version and did not have a download version in its online shop. A bit sad if you want to immediately use what you just bought. I guess we are slaves of modern times already.
In order to create backups of the Bluray titles you own, we used Slysofts AnyDVD HD. At the time they offered AnyDVD HD with lifetime free updates. This is unfortunately no longer the case.
Music
We had the option of using two music players. Either Windows Media Player that is tightly integrated with Media Center or Apples iTunes. The latter even seemed to be nicer to use than WMP. Integration to Media Center is not so important as you generally don’t want to turn on your TV or worse yet, the projector to select a track. So we needed another solution for that anyways which came in the form of the Philips 7500 universal remote.
Using apps such as MusicBridge or MCETunes allow you to sync your iTunes Library to WMP. Get the best of both worlds.
Plugins
There’s a few must have’s in my opinion to extend the functionality of Media Center. Most of those Plugins are free.
A bunch of them are listed on these sites:
Webguide (free)
This is pretty much similar to mythweb, offering a nice and polished web interface to schedule you recordings and much more. You can even watch streams from your machines recordings. It installs a web server along the way.
MyMovies
Media Centers own Video „Plugin“ is not very powerful. MyMovies does what MythVideo does and much more still. Along the way it installs a SQL database server. It is free but some features require unlocking. You earn points by submitting metadata about DVDs and the like. Gather enough points and you can unlock more features.