Jessica Zahn, everyone’s best friend and Program Manager on
the TV Team at Microsoft is going to be doing a presentation about issues in
the Media Center community relating to TV in the next day or so. Go ahead and hop on over to The
Green Button and voice your concerns about current issues, problems, or
future requests and Jessica and is going pass on the issues to the rest of the
TV Team.
Remember, Jessica is part of the TV Team. So your requests for non-TV items, while I’m
sure they are welcome, don’t really apply to her task.
I came up with a sort list yesterday. It’s far from complete, but here are some of
the things that I’d like to see looked into. Note that I wouldn’t expect a lot of these to be in the product, but I think it would be great for someone else to pick up the TweakMCE ball and run with it. Matt Goyer did a great job on the version for Media Center 2005, but he’s now left Microsoft to work at Redfin doing real estate (Redfin was on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, so good job to Matt and the rest of the guys at Redfin!).
I don’t think things like adding online content streams to the EPG should be included in the shipping product, but instead should be hackable using a tool like TweakMCE. Same goes for things like having WMV show in Recorded TV. I think the market for features like that is small enough, yet doesn’t seem like it would require a lot of development work that it could be done via a TweakMCE like application.
- CableCARD w/o new OEM PC.
- DIRECTV w/o new OEM PC and fast!
- Better DVB support outside the US (including MHEG-5, etc).
- Workout a transcoding solution for CableCARD/DIRECTV so
it could be put on a Zune and still protected - Better sort options for Recorded TV (Air date, etc)
- Allow WMV content to be shown in Recorded TV. The metadata is kept in the process, but only
DVR-MS file are currently allowed to be display. - Ability to add online TV streams to the EPG
- Some type of “Follow me” feature for moving
from Extender to Extender, where it can automagically pick up where you left
off. - Out of the box support for 4 NTSC/CableCARD/DIRECTV
tuners+2 OTA. Two is great, but limiting
for larger households. - Whatever everyone else says.
I should also note that Jessica and the rest of the
Microsoft employees that have followed her to The Green Button to help support
and answer questions is very appreciated.
For a product with a growing community behind it, it’s nice to see more
and more direct communication between Microsoft and the community.
What do you mean by “follow me” when moving from extender to extender? How is this different from the existing functionality, where if I pause or stop a show on one 360, then go upstairs to another 360, and resume from where I left off?
“Follow Me” would allow some sort of sending the show to the second Extender, so you can truly pick up where you left off without navigating back to Recorded TV, then selecting the show and then resume.
It would also be nice (though much more difficult) to integrate music into this, would would basically be able to provide a semi-multi-room audio environment.
I’d like to see some more zooming modes in MCE, there should be at least one mode between Zoom 1 and 2. More than often movies and seriers are shown as widescreen but the subtitles are placed so that when having zoom 2 the last subtitle row is not visible. It’s not that big issue for you english speaking guys (or germans who dub everything 🙂 but for me in Sweden it’s pretty annoying. My plasma (Pioneer) has a mode the call 14:9 which is pretty good for this scenario though.