Windows XP Media Center Edition

Published on 1st January 2006 at 22:05 by Brian Butterworth on UK Free TV

Windows XP Media Centre Edition, Microsoft's latest version of their popular operating system provides full personal video recorder facilities. Used in conjunction with a Microsoft remote control a television or computer screen can be transformed to record television for you.

A new large and simple menu system gives you access to DVDs, CDs, MP3 music and all the usual functions of Microsoft Windows. With two Freeview cards installed it matches any other device for personal video functions.



This is far the best option for those with a plasma or LCD television for the picture quality, and Dolby digital sound is supported. To function it will need to have an internet connection to connect to download the programme guide.

When connected to a network, all recorded programmes are shared. This allows programmes to be watched on other computers or an X-Box, or copied to a portable device or laptop for watching elsewhere.



The most sophisticated series record facility has an elephants memory and will record programmes when they appear on other channels or at other times. It can deal with recording clashes intelligently, and will pick up new series automatically.

However you cannot currently listen to digital radio stations on Freeview, and there are no plans to support the interactive services such as BBCi. As it is based around standard PC, if you want to add more hard drive space later (or other hardware, perhaps a DVD writer) this is both possible and inexpensive.

Your comments are always welcome. Please use the form below to add your thoughts or questions to this page. We will get back to you as soon as we can.

Adam Dickson
Monday 19 February 2007 12:02PM Kirkcaldy

What would you actually required to have this package what software would you actually require to run this software?

1 post

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Briantist
Monday 19 February 2007 2:20PM

This can now be bought as Windows Vista Home Ultimate Edition. See Windows Vista: Recommended System Requirements

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Rick
Saturday 26 July 2008 10:13PM

>However you cannot currently listen to >digital radio stations on Freeview.

In the Vista version of Media Center it is possible to listen to digital radio stations on Freeview. Its just not where you would expect it to be!
Select your Electronic Programme Guide and you should see a full list of channels both TV and radio) broadcasting in your area. Select the one of interest and the audio stream will play for the radio station. However the picture displayed is a frozen frame of that of your last TV channel. Eventually this changes and the screen displays a blue background and the words "Digital Audio Service".

Note choosing "radio" under the music menu will result in "No services Found"

3 posts

Rick
Saturday 26 July 2008 10:23PM

Note that the EPG used by Media Centre is not as reliable (or anything like as accurate) as that broadcast by Freeview - it doe not reflect last minute programme changes and timeslips. It appears the supplier to Microsoft does not include the information for all regions / transmitters for Freeview. A frequent complaint in Scotland is the absence of information for ITV services from some transmitters such as STV, ITV2, ITV3 all of which display "No data available". Distinctly imiting Media Centres use for recording these channels.

3 posts

Rick
Saturday 26 July 2008 10:29PM

Under Vista, Microsoft Media centre continues NOT to not support the Freeview interactive services such as BBCi, Teletext or "red button" alternative video streams such as the BBCs sports coverage (rugby, golf etc).

3 posts

RB
Sunday 27 July 2008 12:27AM

You have a mismatch between the channel name as broadcast on Freeview and that appearing in the MCE programme guide.

stv (lower case) is the channel name as broadcast on freeview, but on the MCE channel data it is called STV. Once you associate the two you should be OK.

You do this by going into settings - TV - Guide - Add listings to channel select stv and scroll down the data to STV and select then save. Note an oddity of this technique is that in the MCE EPG, stv will appear listed as ITV1, but with the Scottish TV data (easily checked by ensuring Scotland Today appears at 6pm Mon - Fri).

You have to repeat the same with ITV 2 linking to ITV2 and ITV 3 to ITV3 etc.

1 post

Briantist
Sunday 27 July 2008 8:51AM

RB: This problem is not just in Scotland, and can sometimes be overcome by using the "generic Freeview transmitter" option, rather than the correctly named one. You can report these errors directly to Microsoft here -  Microsoft - Discussions in UK Specific MCE Discussions - and they usually fix them!

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Briantist
Sunday 27 July 2008 8:59AM

Rick: Indeed you are able to listen to the radio stations on the Vista version of Media Center.

37,135 posts