Bye Bye to Windows Media Center for Me
Well, this past weekend, I finally decommissioned my Windows 7 Media Center Box. I’ve been a Windows Media Center user for about five years now and have worked with just about every version of Windows Media Center starting back with the Windows XP Media Center Edition. The reason that I have decided to toss my dedicated Windows Media Center was pretty simple – I can do just about everything the Windows Media Center does with the other boxes I have in my house and they are just more reliable.
In the early days, I used Media Center extensively for recording television programs, but since I came back to the Tivo world three years ago, the Windows Media Center has just not been doing much besides sucking up electricity and occasionally crashing. I rebuilt my box numerous times and primarily used it as a dedicated media center, but in the end, it is simply not as reliable as my Tivo devices are. Sure, Tivo has the $99 annual fee, but the folks over at Tivo have been very active updating their offering and now my Tivo does just about everything except stream my .MP4 movies. For that task, I have a number of dedicated streamers that do the job fine.
The problem is that Windows is a very complex operating system and while I may only be asking that it do some basic media center functions, all of the Windows baggage comes along with it. This means the occasional crash which essentially means that media center was simply not reliable enough to be used as my primary TV recording solution. The final nail in the proverbial coffin was the move by Comcast in my area to effectively end analog broadcasts of almost every station besides the basic cable. This meant that my only options were to have a very restricted TV channel selection or to shell out $400 on a Cablecard tuner for my PC. $400? Seriously? That is 4 YEARS of Tivo subscriptions and at the end of that time, I would likely want to upgrade my media center hardware further increasing the cost differential over my Tivo box.
I recently “upgraded” my Tivo HD to the new Premiere box and this meant that I had the option to keep my old Tivo activated and to enable the ability to the Tivos to see the programs recorded on each other. I now effectively have four HD tuners using cablecards and the new Tivo box was half the cost of that dedicated cablecard tuner for a Media Center.
In the long run, I just don’t see Windows being the winning play in the form factor of a dedicated and noisy PC. Microsoft does have an excellent media center application and it would be nice to see them combine that with their new Windows 7 embedded OS to create a dedicated Media center box that runs a lot quieter and cooler than a full blown PC. Until that happens, I think I’m going to stick with my Tivos. Sure, the Comcast cable boxes are fine, but the Tivo offers so much more and for not that much more money. Plus, I can download practically any recorded TV show and play it on any device whenever I want. With functionality like that, why do I need a dedicated Media Center PC?