Why is MS not supporting Media Centre with XB1? *spawn
- Thread starter Jwm
- Start date
What bothers me is that it appears that MS gave up gaming capability in order to shoe-horn in all this other stuff. And it looks like they jacked up the price whilst doing so.
The 360 was $399 at launch, and was absolutely bleeding edge hardware at the time.
The XB1 is $499 at launch, and you'd be being charitable to call its hardware "mid-tier".
Okay, okay, they obviously had to give some stuff in order to offer us....
Uh. Hmm. Hang on, it'll come to me....
Ah! Kinect 2! And a wonderland of media-related services and features.
So surely that will include the Microsoft branded media product that I use more than any other game or application on my 360s, right?
Nope.
"The Xbox One will work with the DVR you already have." Except, you know, the actual DVR I have.
So, yeah. I feel a bit let down. I'll live, of course. My four 360s aren't gonna self-destruct, and thus television will continue to be served throughout my house. But I'll be damned if I can figure out how any of this is supposed to entice me to stay on their platform(s).
No. None of those other TV streaming solutions support proper cable card support for copy once flagged media, which is nearly every single cable channel depending on your provider. This is because no one but Microsoft has payed the license fee to implement Playready DRM.
You can use other back ends in the US for analog signal or for component capture but not for Cable card digital channels. This means you will need one capture device per stream. With cable card you can multistream up to 6 streams/channels at once using 1 cablecard with the ceton device.
You can use other back ends in the US for analog signal or for component capture but not for Cable card digital channels. This means you will need one capture device per stream. With cable card you can multistream up to 6 streams/channels at once using 1 cablecard with the ceton device.
Nope, it can do many things the 360 can't, and almost everything it can. Including hooking up to your MC, although only through HDMI in right now. Just because it doesn't include an almost unused, and, frankly, boring feature, does not make it less capable.
Media center as a product is essentially dead. Next I assume you want it to include analog out and the capability to connect to Novell Netware servers?
Boring feature ?
IF ms got its ass in gear it would be a killer feature for its phones and tablets. Buy a media center pc and stream any where in the world your cable tv channels. Doesn't sound lame to me.
What an utter load of condescending crap this post is...
"Many people don't use this feature, therefore you shouldn't want to either."
"The XB1 can't do X, but since I think X is "boring", it doesn't really count."
"The XB1 can do almost everything the 360 can."
Oh really? Here's what I use my 360(s) for, in rough order of time spent:
- Watch recorded TV off my remote WMC box
- Play 360 games
- Watch Netflix
Looks like the XB1 might go one for three, if I'm super charitable. (Some of my 360s are used as extenders exclusively.) "Almost everything", my ass. It looks closer to "almost nothing" to me.
I found that the ability to use my three 360s as television extenders in different rooms of my house to be a fantastically useful feature. It also must be saving me close to $500 in set top box and DVR rental fees my cable company would otherwise charge me. (I switched over to WMC about 4 years ago, so do the math.) Seriously, aside from their core OS products, WMC is almost certainly the best Microsoft product I've ever used. I have literally zero complaints about it. Thank God they're killing it, huh?
I assure you that if WMC was "almost unused" as you say, that is purely down to some combination of customer ignorance, and spectacularly bad marketing from MS. The latter leading to the former, I assume.
Yeah, it should be fun running a 75 foot HDMI cable from my media server to my XB1. Oh, wait. No it won't, because I'm not likely to buy an XB1 (or three) now. It's clear I'm neither valued nor understood as a customer. Heck, It sounds like I'm being held in utter contempt for liking and using an "unpopular" MS product all these years. Lesson learned, I guess?
Grrrrr. You know, I'm not even that disappointed about extender functionality going away. My existing 360s and copy of Win7 are paid for and should continue to provide a great distributed TV solution for (God willing) years to come. It would have been nice to "retire" the 360 on my gaming TV, but oh well. But jeez, some of the excuses/attacks being brought forth about how I shouldn't even be using WMC because, "Hyuk, hyuk, that sounds stupid. An' shit, I ain't even ever used it!" are just infuriating.
It isn't a widely used feature. It's barely used at all. They're prioritizing needs vs wants vs nice to haves. Unfortunately extender fits into the latter category.
Wow, so much anger. I'm not the one who kicked your puppy.
This is a simple case of economics. Cost of feature vs expected utility of feature. In this case, it is a barely used feature, so utility is low. And yes, it's boring. MCE functionality will not convince new people to buy the console. I'm not the one who thinks it is boring. The general public as a whole has declared it boring.
Microsoft is still planning on selling the 360 for quite a while, you shouldn't need to worry about upkeep of your quite impressive ecosystem until such time as MCE comes to the XB1. If it does. I wouldn't lay money on it...
did the general public ... or is simply the case that the general public has no idea what it is because it was never really pushed by ms .
Every time I talk about my set up at home people want me to set it up for them at their house. But you know what your right ... Saving hundreds of dollars a year is boring.
Like I said , if MS actually pushed Media center , put it in the xbox one and then said hey guess what , you know how you love tv and our xbox one does all this cool stuff with tv.. well if you use our media center you can watch your recordings and fav shows on your surface and on your windows phone .
That is something that you don't have with android or ios .
But this is an area that ms is obviously short sighted with.
It was much smarter to put their money and time into that drm basket that everyone is so excited for ... oh wait
did the general public ... or is simply the case that the general public has no idea what it is because it was never really pushed by ms .
Every time I talk about my set up at home people want me to set it up for them at their house. But you know what your right ... Saving hundreds of dollars a year is boring.
Like I said , if MS actually pushed Media center , put it in the xbox one and then said hey guess what , you know how you love tv and our xbox one does all this cool stuff with tv.. well if you use our media center you can watch your recordings and fav shows on your surface and on your windows phone .
That is something that you don't have with android or ios .
But this is an area that ms is obviously short sighted with.
It was much smarter to put their money and time into that drm basket that everyone is so excited for ... oh wait
Isn't this what smartglass and dlna/miracast is for?
Dlna sucks and miracast xlones your pc. So it would work if everyone eants to watch the same show
The media center team was disbanded. There has been essentially no development on it for years.did the general public ... or is simply the case that the general public has no idea what it is because it was never really pushed by ms .
Every time I talk about my set up at home people want me to set it up for them at their house. But you know what your right ... Saving hundreds of dollars a year is boring.
Like I said , if MS actually pushed Media center , put it in the xbox one and then said hey guess what , you know how you love tv and our xbox one does all this cool stuff with tv.. well if you use our media center you can watch your recordings and fav shows on your surface and on your windows phone .
That is something that you don't have with android or ios .
But this is an area that ms is obviously short sighted with.
It was much smarter to put their money and time into that drm basket that everyone is so excited for ... oh wait
Every time I tell people about the things the Kin could do, they want one too. It could do things that have not been replicated in any phone since. But only a few people bought it, so it went away. Such is the way of products.
Media center is harder to set up, and harder to maintain, than sticking with whatever the cable company gives you. It might be cheaper, although with the cost of a media center and the time involved in setting it up and maintaining it, I'm not even too sure of that.
Having used a device that requires cable cards, I have first hand knowledge of what a pain they are, and they were even worse when Media Center was first launched. I think these issues fatally wounded the product at a time when it was trying to get public support.
And yes, saving money is "boring" if no one bothers to buy the product. Just like all the awesome features of the Kin were useless, because no one used them.
That's just idiocy from MS . The kin wouldn't have lived because it was late and their partner didn't want it any more. After all why charge $10 for the kins features when they could charge $30 + for data on an iphone.
As for media center its very easy to set up. You plug in the tuner to usb , put the cable card in . Spend 2 minutes with customer support activating it (same amount of time with cable vision as activating a box they sent in the mail) and load up media center and boom it works .
MS isn't afraid to relaunch products over and over again even when they fail. Hell they've been trying to make tablets happen since 2002.
But you know it will prob be the same story as the tablet. MS will do it , fail and then apple will come in years later and hit it out of the park and then ms will have to scramble to get something working again. Just like tablets and phones .
Media Center has a large and loyal following, and a cottage industry that ties Media Center into really cool home automation packages.
Look I have been using this for 11-years plus beta, and prior to that I used the ATI solutions. It is a fantastic package, and many of us will argue that nothing else can come close or fit our now spoiled needs. MS thinks that they did a fantastic job marketing MC, if I search hard enough I can probably find the posts where they say as much a few years before the team was dismembered. I found out about MC by accident when I was looking to upgrade out of the ATI versions.
Then the OEM's only really hurt the package, with your only option to go with $3k to $5k pre-built packages. I remember at the time I had to hunt down a motherboard that had the right bios flag to be able to make it all work, it still cost me $3k DIY for that MC build.
With Win8 there are strong rumors that much of the code was re-written, early builds would barely run for example. So MS did put some effort into updating it instead of killing it off, and now they even have a decent website page for it.
They were never happy with adoption rates on MC, something like what 20 million users during the vista days? But honestly for a product that was basically hidden, not advertised since the XP days, that is not bad. They are making the same advertising mistakes with Win8, Xbox, Kin, WP, Surface, Zune, etc. That is the one area that MS always seems to fail at for the last 10 or so years.
It used to be really hard to setup, my early vista build was a mess. Now the USB tuners are great and simple, no more reading 30-pages and 2-hour setups that would fail at 75%.
With the 360 MCE I have not had to touch a remote since 2005, and I don't even have normal TV's because of this (projectors or monitors). I have had countless people see my setup and ask where to buy it, only to find out they already own most of it. I have helped to 70+ year old families set this up and to this day they still use it with no issues!
I guess my hope was that with X1 MS would try again and finally advertise it correctly, and maybe they are working on an update to it since the new One Guide is almost a green replica of what we have today. I just really wish MS would fire the PR company and start telling us just what the heck this thing is. TV TV TV turned into no info at all on TV, they promised more info only to stay quite over the backlash.
End of my rant over MC, hopefully MS has something cooking. I looked at the alternatives over the last few days and nothing fits my needs, so worst case I will stay with my current setup until they remove support for it. 3-years left on 360, but I see no reason why it won't go longer unless play ready is not updated after that.
Look I have been using this for 11-years plus beta, and prior to that I used the ATI solutions. It is a fantastic package, and many of us will argue that nothing else can come close or fit our now spoiled needs. MS thinks that they did a fantastic job marketing MC, if I search hard enough I can probably find the posts where they say as much a few years before the team was dismembered. I found out about MC by accident when I was looking to upgrade out of the ATI versions.
Then the OEM's only really hurt the package, with your only option to go with $3k to $5k pre-built packages. I remember at the time I had to hunt down a motherboard that had the right bios flag to be able to make it all work, it still cost me $3k DIY for that MC build.
With Win8 there are strong rumors that much of the code was re-written, early builds would barely run for example. So MS did put some effort into updating it instead of killing it off, and now they even have a decent website page for it.
They were never happy with adoption rates on MC, something like what 20 million users during the vista days? But honestly for a product that was basically hidden, not advertised since the XP days, that is not bad. They are making the same advertising mistakes with Win8, Xbox, Kin, WP, Surface, Zune, etc. That is the one area that MS always seems to fail at for the last 10 or so years.
It used to be really hard to setup, my early vista build was a mess. Now the USB tuners are great and simple, no more reading 30-pages and 2-hour setups that would fail at 75%.
With the 360 MCE I have not had to touch a remote since 2005, and I don't even have normal TV's because of this (projectors or monitors). I have had countless people see my setup and ask where to buy it, only to find out they already own most of it. I have helped to 70+ year old families set this up and to this day they still use it with no issues!
I guess my hope was that with X1 MS would try again and finally advertise it correctly, and maybe they are working on an update to it since the new One Guide is almost a green replica of what we have today. I just really wish MS would fire the PR company and start telling us just what the heck this thing is. TV TV TV turned into no info at all on TV, they promised more info only to stay quite over the backlash.
End of my rant over MC, hopefully MS has something cooking. I looked at the alternatives over the last few days and nothing fits my needs, so worst case I will stay with my current setup until they remove support for it. 3-years left on 360, but I see no reason why it won't go longer unless play ready is not updated after that.
Us users of WMC in our home networks might be a small percentage of overall TV viewers but it's still a very large amount of users whom rely on WMC for their household watching, dvr, shared recordings, drm channel viewing etc.
I know this is going back to the initial complaints made during the first announcement of the XBO features but for a box that was so raved about by them for TV use, it just seems stupid to not include this at release.
I know this is going back to the initial complaints made during the first announcement of the XBO features but for a box that was so raved about by them for TV use, it just seems stupid to not include this at release.
That kind of arrogant attitude by MS workers/ex-workers is costing them many consumers. Like that guy that told people to buy the 360 if they didn´t like the xbone.
I'm far more likely to want my Xbox One to be a DLNA media server or client, than anything else. That way it works with my Apple products, or non Microsoft stuff.
You've just got to accept that what you want is not what everyone else wants. MCE was not a feature that was desirable to the large majority of consumers on Xbox 360, or even on PC for that matter.
You've just got to accept that what you want is not what everyone else wants. MCE was not a feature that was desirable to the large majority of consumers on Xbox 360, or even on PC for that matter.
A niche market that is almost invisible to the consumers for 7-8 years of zero marketing is not going to survive no matter how awesome it is.
Many of my friends are rabid Apple fans, when they see media center for the first time at my house they just want to know more. Where can they buy it, where was I hiding the device, how big is it, etc. They will even comment about how fresh and fast it is (Win8 version, hehe not the slower 7MC that lags like mad on the 360).
Regardless this invisible product is still serving a few smaller companies well enough to keep them expanding their product offerings. Give this software package to Apple and I bet it would be a critical success.
