Vista Media Center is severely lacking
Stop using Vista and move to Windows 7.
Update: This post refers to Beta 2 of Windows Vista. It remains for reference purposes, however is most likely innacurate in the context of the released product.
The first stage of my enthusiastic upgrade push was to upgrade my Media Center box to Windows Vista Ultimate. The install experience was great. Vista is great. The included build of Media Center is somewhere between appauling and utterly pathetic.
Launching Media Center from the Start menu or the official remote results in me seeing a black screen (not even a mouse cursor) for about 30 seconds with no sound. Eventually I see and hear the Media Center UI appear. The used to load almost instantly in XP MCE even though the machine had 256MB of RAM instead of the 1GB that I installed in preparation for Vista. The graphics card has another 256MB of video RAM on it so there shouldn’t be any delays there either.It can’t even play an MP3 file smoothly – it stutters and jerks every 15 to 20 seconds.It took almost 3 hours to add 14 MP3 files to the library from a local folder.All of my movies (XViDandDivXformat primarily) play fine inWMP11, and both Windows Explorer and Media Center display thumbnail snapshots (which are generated separately instead of being shared), however they won’t play in Media Center. I get a black screen and audio … nothing else … not even an error message so I can start diagnosing the problem.The user interface feels like a serious step backwards, but that’s just my subjective feeling.
Overall, my experience with Vista has been great so far. I haven’t had a single crash / bug, even though I quite willingly expected to see 1 or 2 by now. My experience with Media Center leaves much to be desired, and I’m currently reformatting back to XP MCE again so that I can actually watch TV. We shouldn’t be seeing issues as deep as this by the second beta.
technorati tags:windows, vista, xp, mediacenter, mce, wmp11, wmp, mp3, xvid, divx
Update: My XViD and DivX movies now play properly. The DivX codec seems to be incompatible with this build, but the XViD codec can decode both formats. Having DivX installed kills both formats though – wierd. I still consider this to be a bug on Microsoft’s side as it wouldn’t report the codec error at all like WMP does. Most of the time it shows a scrambled screen (because of the transition effect) that is meant to be drawn over by the movie but just never does. I’ll see if I can stay on this platform after all … but most likely not considering it still can’t even play an MP3 file.
[...] About an hour I blogged about the fact that the Media Center packaged with Vista Beta 2 couldn’t even play an MP3 file smoothly (along with a number of other issues). It turns out that there seems to be a memory leak in the eshell.exe process (the Media Center) UI which keeps spiralling it into an obscene footprint and chewing up most of my CPU cycles before eventually crashing. I’ve found a partial workaround that at least lets the sound work for a short amount of time during this destructive period. [...]
Enter the Tatrix » Playing MP3 files in Vista Beta 2 Media Center
June 18, 2006 at 19:02
Hmm
what build are you using? I find that Media Center doesnt have a clue about xvid movies when I add a folder, what is your secret ??
Hawkz
June 28, 2006 at 17:45
@Hawkz – you need to install the codecs from http://xvid.com/codecs.html before they will be recognised.
Tatham Oddie
June 30, 2006 at 09:54
I am sure I tried that first as it was the first thought that came to my head. I have read on the newsgroups for beta 2 that media center won’t read anything other than WMV’s and other MS formats…
Hawkz
June 30, 2006 at 22:43
I have been using Vista Media Center as well. I admit it has some flaws but not nearly as many as you have encountered. For more info see
http://jritmeijer.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8A48A27460FB898A!788.entry
Jeroen Ritmeijer
January 2, 2007 at 00:21
thanks
garyM
January 25, 2007 at 19:01
Haha. I like this post. You make it very clear that it’s time for people to move on. But sometimes, that’s just not an option. For me, Vista will have to do for a little longer–until I am ready to buy a new laptop. And I don’t want to invest in upgrading to Windows 7 for a laptop that I will only be using for a few more months. Thanks for the chuckle though!
maxregistrycleaner.com
July 2, 2010 at 09:12