Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
I don't intend to too spend much time talking about MCE2005 in this article; I'm saving a full review of Microsoft's new media interface for another piece of work. What I will say is that it's slick, usually works well and is easy enough for first time users to grasp quickly and easily. It's maybe the most polished of the 10-foot GUIs I've seen for media center applications over the past couple of years, Microsoft going for the soft blues and greens of Windows XP in the UI, that everyone else seems to use to good effect.
Based on Windows XP Professional, Media Centre 2005 is an application layer and API set that sits on top to provide the multimedia services. Supported hardware is growing, although is still thin on the ground. That you buy a pre-certified system the large majority of the time, when thinking about MCE devices, does however mean that hardware compatibility is taken care of for you. Conversely, it does mean that for full exploitation of absolutely all of MCE2005's key features, you need certain combinations of hardware that tend to stop MCE2005-based PCs being particularly cheap right now, the official compatibility list encapsulating some currently expensive parts.
The best place to start for MCE2005 information is Microsoft's own site where you can tour the interface, give it a test drive and see where to buy it and what it's capable of.
In terms of integration with Tranquil's T2.e/MCE2005, the interface drives the interactive television service which includes digital terrestrial tuning here in the UK, timeshifted TV and tuning with a single tuner. Single tuners have their limitations, mainly restricting you to watching whatever it is you're recording at the time. With MCE2005 and using the integrated program guide, you can setup recordings based on program name, channel, time or date, or a combination of any defining factors. Like a TiVo or similar, you can record an entire series of programs with a couple of clicks of the remote.
The electronic program guide needs an internet connection to work. Tranquil recommend you use the WiFi addon card for the T2.e/MCE2005, but neglect to sell you, or even recommend to you, any of the other network infrastructure you'll need to connect a WiFi-equipped unit to the internet, instead forcing you to reasearch and find your own. Running Ethernet cable to your living room might be a simple job, but WiFi seems suited to MCE2005 PCs for the ease-of-use, MCE2005 (particularly with Windows XP Service Pack 2 installed) making it very easy to setup a WiFi connection.
Problems
Usage of MCE2005 on the Tranquil wasn't perfect, despite what you can read elsewhere on the web. I took the unit to my girlfriend's mother's home over the holidays at the end of last year, setting it up but then giving no real instruction on how to use it, bar telling them that the familiar activity of pressing the green Windows button on the remote would get them started. Watching that was a great way to observe at first hand what MCE2005's glaring flaws are without coming from the angle of someone who knows how they work and how to get around little foibles in operation.For example, powering the unit down whilst in the middle of watching television would mean that television would no longer work when you brought the machine out of hibernation. The hardware overlay on the FX 5200 would become disconnected by Media Center, a black screen persisting and nothing being rendered into it. Imagine switching on your basic TV set to be confronted with no signal on any channel until you turned it off at the mains and turned it back on, after using the TV's standby function? Would you put up with that from your Sky service, or your cable TV service? I wouldn't. I was forced to leave the unit on all the time to avoid it.
Sometimes the remote would stop responding, forcing you to attach a keyboard to get control over the unit to reboot it. It's a Windows PC remember. And while XP can recover the filesystem if you shut down forcefully without going through the usual motions with a keyboard, you wouldn't want that to happen very often.
Teletext, a service that I certainly take for granted on my television, didn't work at all, forcing me to go back to the regular TV and its tuner to use that service. There's a teletext button on the remote, why doesn't that work? The tuner supports it.
Finally, the DVD player application would stop responding after playing one disk. I got Lord of the Rings for Christmas, on DVD, and we watched Return of the King. Disc one would complete, we'd be asked to swap to disc two, after which no video would appear, leaving just a black screen. That was a persistent problem and easily recreated with the other films in that trilogy. If you had to power cycle your basic DVD deck after playing just one disc, wouldn't you return it for one that worked properly?
Small things like the GUI not showing you a full program title when you change channel, rather a limited character chop, leaving you to guess at what's on or look at the main guide, mount up and leave you with the impression that things aren't quite there yet.
The niggles are something that Tranquil will have to sort out for their customers, preferably via a dedicated section on their website that you can connect to (if possible) from the MCE2005 device, with a default large font size that's readable from the majority of TVs. The unit doesn't have DVI, so connection to a HDTV is likely to be slim. If I were a paying customer, I wouldn't put up with the niggles I encountered for any real length of time. Yes, most of them are Microsoft problems, but the user of the unit won't care; Tranquil will be their first port of call. Self-support with these devices doesn't work like it does on a PC. You're less inclined to hit up Google for some support, rather you'll pick up the phone and google Tranquil that way.
To sum up, the majority of usage goes without a single problem, but when something does crop up (Windows XP tray notifications appearing over the TV overlay for example), it's wholly annoying. I maintain that for a piece of consumer electronics, you wouldn't suffer the issues on anything else costing what the T2.e/MCE2005 does. And I argue that it's the software's fault, not Tranquil's; MCE2005 is simply not allowing hardware vendors to make consumer-friendly devices that work 24/7, 365 days a year, without fail or hiccough.
