The various levels of suckage - Windows MCE

time for another moan, bet you couldnt wait. I've been using windows mce 2004/2005/vista mce since they came out. So I have a valid opinion on it.

I also worked for a company which designed dedicated media center machines. Slick looking boxes for under the tv action. drool. Around 20000 sold, and counting. So that means I have a very valid opinion.

My son has a mce machine in his room, I have one in the lounge, and my car is running mce. I also got my brother and sister set up with mce.
So now I have a very very very valid opinion.

That means you have to sit and listen while I moan, because I am not moaning due to having a bad day. I am moaning due to this piece of crap microsoft is trying to tout to all and sundry. Yes, I have given it a good innings, more than most would attempt, and I still use it for lack of anything else wife friendly. That doesnt make it good.

So, lets begin the suckage tour, in random order.

1) Vista MCE UI elements. Guys, you stuck a new menu on the front of all the pages, the slick looking sliding up and down and left and right semi-transparent sections look great, especially with live tv playing in the background when browsing the menus. Then you go one layer deeper, and wtf is this? mce2005 menus, no transparent overlay type background...all back to the way it was. What happened? did you run out of money to pay the people to sort out the rest of the pages? You sold me the same product, with a different frontend, but the frontend is only partially new. The rest is still the same. Here is some advice. There are only two ways to do anything: YOU CAN DO IT RIGHT, OR YOU CAN DO IT AGAIN. As far as Vista MCE is concerned, you are going to have to do it again.

2) Live tv quality. Not all of us live in the land of OTA HD via ATSC and cablecard tuners. Some of us gotta take our set top boxes and feed them into an analogue tv tuner card. I own around 11 analog tuners. I made it a mission to find and select the best one over a period of time. Currently, it is a theatre 550 implemented on a pci-e x1 interface. It still sucks. Sure, I have a 40" Sony Bravia lcd (massively lovely colours) but it really sucks. You lose the upper 5% of colour range, and the picture is less defined. Why? because the stupid tuners need to get fed via svideo or composite. Where is my rgb enabled tv capture??? up the creek, that is where. In this day and age it is not imaginable to feed a 40" or bigger tv with an svideo signal. Sorry, that doesnt cut it. set top box--->svideo--->theatre 550--->hdmi--->lcd tv. lowest signal is the svideo, and it degrades everything else with it. Of course, we had cards such as the sweetspot with proper rgb capture, but noooo.....lets not help the guys with developing a software wrapper for this card, lets have everybody use svideo or composite for feeding their $2000 pc's. There, I said it. You couldve done better. Now, go back and do it again

3) What the hell is up with the music - Media Center PC. the center of my media. This includes music. Why is this so hard to understand. Why did winamp in circa 2000 have this down pitty pat and here I have a dual core machine which is sluggish when searching my music databse? Did I did up the graves of 1000 dead indian chief, piss in them and then chuck the bodies back? No, I just bought a microsoft product. I will let you decide which is a worse sin.

4) Pictures - what? did you have some space left on the menu and thought "lets tack something in there, like a picture module, but do it quickly before launch". The picture module is basic. Very basic. In fact, I do not get a semi-hardon when thinking about the picture module. Much less in fact. I would prefer you to leave it out. That way, I wont have to maon about it being a lump of junk, plus maybe my menus would be faster without having to skip over this module.

5) media database. Now guys, let me tell you a secret. Music goes into c:\mp3 and videos goes into c:\videos. That isnt rocket science. Just good housekeeping...you remember good housekeeping right? So, why change things....why for the love of $diety did you go mess about with this in vista mce? why do you expect c:\media with subfolder mp3 and videos? What gives you the right to dictate my filesystem preference? To those that dont know what I am talking about, you now have a media pool. This shits on so many levels I cant begin to explain all of it, but suffice to say that album coverart stored in c:\mp3's now gets added to the picture library. please, someone, shoot someone else before they think they have another clever idea.

6) where is softsled? oh wait, I know, it competed with the mce part of the xbxo 360, so you pulled it well and good. So now, instead of having one good beefy mce machine centralised (windows home server???) with little xp machines littered around the house pulling data off it, younow want me to plonk an mce machine under each telly, and have them operate in little glass houses by themselves. each with it's own tuner, not being able to share recorded tv without creative registry hacks. That smell, that is my dick in your mouth. Bastards. Client - server, I have heard of it. Have you?

7) your mce keyboard, the little nipple mouse thingy. My wife has nipples, two of them. They both work. Why cant you even get your ONE to work? I get a cramp thinking about it, yet ibm thinpads had perfectly functioning nipple mouses long before half of your hardware designers were but a distant thought in their dad's ball-bag.

8) Your mce remote is nice, I like the programmable tv power button. It can make my tv switch off. Of course, it cant make it switch on, I mean who the heck wants their tv on? They may just see the horrid picture quality of vista mce in action. Quite a few tv's I have seen want one button push to bring them out of standby, then another to select the channel the pc is on (hdmi or vga). Some can automatically go back to the last channel they were on. If that is the case, then only some of your customers will be happy. The rest of us will look at that programmable tv button and say "what a fscking half-job". I have an idea for you, implement functionality like hip to use a second ir wand to send macro type ir blasts to accomodate the other 80% of people.

9) My wife just told me "neighbours" didnt record today, as per the scheduled series setting. Do you wanna go explain that to her? I cant. It . Just. Makes. No. Sense.

10) My son just called, his mce2005 box has resumed from standby but is now sitting on the mce menu and wont respond to the remote control. I have been here before with his machine, it needs a reboot. windows is like that. I told him it is probably because it is "made in china". That is our code word for "does not work". Mostly his box is maintenance free. But, as I said at the beginning if this post, a mostly working mce machine, multiplied by the number of machines I oversee means that every night something goes wrong, and I have to drop what I am doing to go sort it out. Like a tv tech support person, living the microsoft dream.

need a bfg, that is what I need...a bfg..