MCE 2005 look back

I love my HTPC, I can record shows like a PVR, yet being a full blown computer system it just satisfy my needs being a gadget and techno freak that I am. I also love watching TV and just hate missing shows that I like. Being in a third world country it's hard to find a working PVR. After browsing the web for a while and read about advantages of a HTPC I decided to build one myself, and boy reading several sites, reading difficulties that people are having does not really justify the difficulty of building one. Well it's not that it's more difficult than building a PC, it's just harder to find the right parts out here.

At first, I started using a spare PC that I have lying around, it was barely adequate, the case was banged up and big, it was just ugly to place in the living room. I added a cheap TV card, it worked, the software that came with it was usable, it could record shows and schedule recording, but I wanted more. I looked around for alternatives front end for my HTPC. read about some linux based ones, but it wasn't compatible with my setup. MCE2005 was released and it looked great, but wasn't compatible either, well not that's it's not compatible, the spec on my system is just underpowered to run MCE. Then I stumble upon showshifter. It was compatible with my system and it looked great, easy to use and to setup. I've grown to like this program. It ran, barely, but it still did everything I wanted it to do.

Then one day, I decided to upgrade, gonna throw out the old system and build a new one, one that has a smaller case and easier on the eyes to look at. To my disappointment, Showshifter wasn't able to run on my new rig. Tried getting windows MCE to tun on my machine since it was more powerful, yet I hit a brick wall when I found out that my TV tuner was not compatible. Windows MCE2005 was extremely picky on hardware, the same video card needed a special MCE driver to run. The list for supported TV card was also short, it was hard to find a TV card that is compatible, took me a whole month just to find and buy a TV card that is compatible.

Getting all the requirements done, it was now time to set up MCE. Yet to my disappointment, MCE was harder to set up than I thought. Setting up TV channel was a nightmare, Microsoft supposedly made TV setup easy one would just download program listing from their server and viola it's done, if your country AND your cable provider is on their database that is. Well mine isn't, I had to scan the channels manually, when that's done, I found that it was impossible to rename channels and after searching articles on renaming channel name on MCE, I found none. Re arranging channel order was also very troublesome, ability to drag and drop channel order was not there, I had to click once to move the channel up one spot, without the ability of renaming channels I was left with just the frequency of the channel which only made the already daunting task all more difficult, took me several hours just to re arrange the channels, my $150 TV could do better. Most front-end I tried does better at this. MCE just simply offer very little customization, making it harder to set up, well unless you are lucky and your cable provider is in their database, which I doubt that Microsoft will be able to add every single one around the world. Adding program listing was also not humanly possible to add. I could download a whole month of program listing from the website of the respective channel, but there's just no way to add it to MCE's EPG. You can input EPG for all your channel all at once, with a tweak and downloaded sofware of course just no easy way of doing this, but it's not possible to add a channel at a time.

And I thought I was done, and be able to live with those as it's only a one time deal. but nooo I wasn't I needed to have a third party video decoder to run DVD on it, not just any decoder, but an MCE certified decoder.

And finally I was done setting up the whole thing. Trying to make my life easier, I tried to find an MCE remote only to find that no one is selling it. I tried to find an online store to get one, it was hard enough to find a store that would ship internationally, I found out that even if they are able to ship internationally the MCE remote however was not exportable. So I finally settled for a set of wireless keyboard and mouse, I works but I'm not happy.

Aside from that, I like the interface, it's clean and easy to use. It's integrated tightly with windows, operation was smooth, it was smooth only after I added another 512Mb of ram to my rig, the 512 i started with was not enough. MCE hogs most of them when it's recording shows, with a gig of RAM I'm still able to use the PC to some extent now, browsing become possible, watching a recored show is now also possible without affecting the show being recorded too greatly. Running a gameboy emulator was sluggish at best, as there aren't enough processing power left even though I thought that an athlon 64 300+ would be enough.

Vista is out now, I still haven't decide to upgrade yet, still waiting for them to iron out bugs, a HTPC should be reliable and be able to run 24X7 without a hitch. But with everything that I read about the high requirements of vista, it seems another upgrade is looming around the corner, whether it's only a memory upgrade that's required, or the whole system altogether. Just hoping that my TV card would be compatible, it could really save me from running around looking for a compatible one.

One can only hope.