Paul Thurrott has trouble with Vista Media Center, I want your thoughts
I don’t normally comment on Paul Thurrott’s posts thought I would on this one. Paul posted a article called “Windows Vista’s Media Center Not Ready for Prime Time” (hasn’t he used this already?) He talks of how slow Vista Media Center is and how some of the UI is still XP based. Well as its a beta I am sure its not 100% ready, thats why its still beta software. From my experience I found the performance OK but the stability not quite there. Thats why I haven’t upgraded my main machine to Vista yet. He does say how he likes the right to left menus and the thumbnail based TV section. I would like to hear how other listeners / readers are getting on with Vista and will do an update on the show
June 29th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Hauppauge Nova-T PCI drivers install but aren’t recognised by MCE. RecordedTV folder points to my recordings but none of them show up under Recorded TV, presumably because TV won’t enable. MPEG decoder won’t play DVR-MS 16×9 files in correct aspect ratio on monitor, makes them letterbox even though it is a 16×9 monitor.
This is build 5456, post public beta. Still a long way to go for me.
June 29th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
Thanks for the feedback Alistair, I am going to try 5456 this week
June 30th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
There is a slightly later Nova-T driver release on their website yesterday. I’ll give these a shot after the footie tonight. Unfortunately their drivers tend to need to be cleared down completely when installing new ones. The Hauppauge utility for clearing the files and registry doesn’t work correctly under Vista so you need to overwrite the installation each time new drivers come along.
October 14th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
Running Vista RC2 here. The first few times I used Media Center via my 360 after upgrading from RC1 the speed was reasonable. However, it’s gotten horribly worse since then. The lag from pressing a button to having the action performed (up, down, select, back, etc..) is on the order of 10’s of seconds. Skipping is common while playing music, one might blame network issues (I’m running wireless) but the same media files play flawlessly via Windows Media Connect.
Disabling the firewall on Vista entirely doesn’t address the issue and I’m not sure what else I can try. Any hints?