Matt Goyer Offers a Bullet Point List of Vista MCE Improvements
By Alexander Grundner |
July 27th, 2006
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Frustrated by all the mis-information and tired of repeating himself on various forums, Matt Goyer, a Project Manager in Microsoft’s eHome division, has publicly posted a current working feature-set for Vista MCE and outlines current hurdles and future advancements for the platform. Lets just say it’s a definite “must read” if your weighing your options in upgrading from MCE 2005 to Vista MCE.
Below is an extended excerpt of Matt Goyer’s post:
Thoughts on MCE beta feedback
I’m one of the few program managers on the Media Center team who reads our beta newsgroups on a daily basis and I must say that I find the experience to be just a little bit frustrating. While I’m tempted to respond to every post I’d like to clear up as much as I can in one blog post and see if I can get this weight off my chest by posting some thoughts here on the feedback we receive.
Build Quality
One thing I find frustrating is seeing you all struggle with the builds we deploy to you. I certainly know there’s problems with them, I install a new build at least every week at home; but I’m paid to install it. You’re not. You’re installing it because you love Media Center. So when I see you struggle with our bugs, bugs that prevent you from really testing the software I get frustrated that we can’t be dropping you better builds. Fortunately, every build gets better and better and a surprising number of you are very patient. Thanks for your patience and thanks for your continued participation. Every bug filed helps (even if we resolve it won’t fix/by design).
We did add new features!
I read over and over about how we haven’t actually added any new features to Media Center this time around and that there is no compelling reason to upgrade from Media Center 2005. Puzzled by this I decided to pull together a list of what’s changed (not an exhaustive list by any means, we still have a few key features hidden up our sleaves):
- Support for 64bit machines
- You can upgrade to Windows Vista Media Center from XP
- Media Center is included as part of two Windows Vista SKUs
- No need to buy a Media Center. You can install yourself.
- Domain join
- Available worldwide in every locale that we ship Windows to (160 new locales! 15 new languages!)
- More content on screen in our photos/music/videos/TV libraries Faster perf for the music library
- OCUR/CableCARD support
- It was very hard to use a mouse in MCE 2005. We’ve made some big improvements to mouse handling.
- Likewise, hard to use with a touch screen before, should be better now
- Run on your Tablet PC
- New start menu to get you to where you want to be faster
- Start photo slideshow from Music Now Playing
- Now playing item on the start menu, should be more discoverable
- More ways to slice and dice your music collection
- New music Now Playing
- Way better queue management
- View photos and videos by folder or date
- Mini TV guide
- TV favorites/most viewed
- TV categories is now discoverable
- TV guide is an overlay
- Easy to get to TV categories
- Thumbnails in recorded TV library
- PAL exhaustive channel scanning
- Microsoft DVD codec
- Native burning solution
- Extender platform. Now any hardware manufacturer can integrate a MCX into their TV, DVD player, etc.
- Tighter integration on start menu for third parties. You’re no longer buired in More Programs
- Windows Media Center Presentation Layer, now you can build apps that have the same fidelity as Media Center
- Windows Presentation Foundation, re-use your Avalon code to build Media Center applications
- Hotstart
If you look at that list I see lots of features that you’ve asked for over the years: 64 bit, native DVD codec, native burning, upgradability, retail availability, better development platform, etc.
UPDATE: Matt just added a Q&A related to his “Thoughts” post. It covers a few nagging details in more depth.
Betty Vanderbeek – 16 hours 48 minutes ago