Windows 7 Media Centre

Well I finally got round to replacing my Windows Vista Media Centre to Windows 7 RTM Media Centre. I use the media centre for everything media related in my house and have done since the first version of XP Media Centre. With that in mind if my TV (Media Centre) is working, then I really do not want to mess around with it as my wife won’t be impressed if she can’t watch her shows. Anyway I moved to Windows 7 on all my other machines as soon as the RC was out and have been really impressed, so as my wife was out last night and we had nothing set to record I felt it was about time to move to the latest incarnation of Media Centre.

Whilst installing the OS I read Microsoft’s sales blurb on the changes they have made to Media Centre. I found a lot of their offerings were features I sort of already had via the TV Pack. However a lot of people didn’t have the benefits of the TV Pack as it was only provided to OEM so you only got it when you purchased a new Windows Vista Media Centre in the later half of last year. Some of us that build our own Media Centre did obtain versions of it via other means but to be honest though it brought some nice new features like interactive Digital TV it also had some bugs, in fact it was pretty buggy.

So how does the new Media Centre compare to the previous version. Well the first thing I will point out is that yet again our friends across the pond gain the vast majority of the improvements and us Brits are just left waiting for more.

New Features you can’t use in the UK,
· TV show images throughout the guide and Recorded TV (not a frame of the show).
· Series recording options have some welcomed additions like HD Preferred, Live, and airtime.
· Internet content has been improved with more channels added and this has been expanded on further with the new Internet TV Beta. Unfortunately the online services are still lacking and on the Internet TV Beta, well that’s US only. However a recent announcement by Microsoft has said it’s on its way to the UK.

Features you can use in the UK,
· Media Center Desktop gadget.
· The new mini guide is 100x better than the old one.
· Guide can be color coded by show type.
· Guide button added when in windowed mode.
· You can easily manually add missing DTV channels without editing xml.
· Windows 7 now supports four tuners of each type (analogue and digital) instead of only two.
· Skipping through a programme or video is noticeably more responsive. However I have an Antec case with a VFD and remote and moving from Vista to 7 meant I lost the ability to skip back and forward within a programme. I could skip a track whilst playing music or photos but not TV or videos. I assume this is an issue with the imon software than Windows 7 however I managed to find a work around changing the skip buttons from the skip function to the Ctrl + F (Skip Forward) and Ctrl + B (Skip Back) which are the controls for media player to skip through.
· Scrub bar when used on a PC is awesome, I really like the thumbnail previews as you drag along the bar.
· The scheduling of recordings seems streamlined.
· Fade in and out when you stop and start video adds to the experience.
· If one show in a folder is going to be deleted there is now an ! and towards the bottom it explains why.
· Current time to the seconds is displayed on the scrub bar when watching Live TV.
· New text input method with remote when searching is improved.
· Pictures and music have a few new features like ratings and favourites.
· The animation of playing music has been dressed up a bit as well as the photos slide show.
· There are now HD logos in the grid and in the show info at the bottom. This was something that was in the TV Pack for Vista. Interestingly I have two DVB-T tuners for Freeview and a lot of programmes now have the HD logo. Obviously they are not HD but it looks impressive.
· Accessing Recorded TV from another Media Centre is easy with HomeGroup, this is great if you have several Media Centres in your home and you want to share some recorded TV from one to another.
· Alphabetical order of Recorded TV is now correct (The Office is listed with Os, not Ts).
· One button press for show info when watching video.
· Can edit channel 3.1 to make it 3 instead of forced to use 1031.
· Extender UI for your Xbox360 is greatly enhanced, it also runs faster.
· Favourite views in the guide, which can be made static so you don't have to select them every time.
· Movie Library now no longer requires e a registry hack to enable the feature. This is one of the features that has really improved. Instead of the old DVD library store it now supports more file types, rather than those vob files. An addition to this is that it will also show all the films that are coming on TV over the next 14 days with the same cinema poster cover art as DVD’s stored in the movies folder.
· Ability to resume video types other than dvr-ms and wtv. This is something I have been after for some time.
· Ability to combine tuners of different types to resolve recording conflicts automatically based on priority.