is MCE really as bad as everyone says?

wannabepvr · 2005-12-07, 10:48 PM

Not planning to jump ship, and I have no personal experience on this, but is MCE really as bad as everyone says?

reven · 2005-12-07, 10:52 PM

yes

capone · 2005-12-07, 10:58 PM

No, but it just wasn't right for me. It's very polished and complete, but you'll hit a point when you need it to do that one make-or-break thing, and that's exactly what it will be missing.

reboot · 2005-12-07, 11:07 PM

Quote:is MCE really as bad as everyone says?

YES!
.dvr_ms recording format. That was enough for me to stay away, far far away.

ricklous · 2005-12-08, 08:28 AM

I think its a bit of a curious beast, MCE.
Like capone says, its quite complete but from what ive seen of it (fiddled around a bit when looking at media centres before i stumbled on GBPVR) theres not much scope to personalise it in the way of GBPVR.

One of the things that drew me to GBPVR (apart from the strong community backing it) was its wealth of plugins and skins which lead me to believe i could say 'let me have a look at the plugins' when my uncle asks 'can it do this' rather than yes/no with mce.

Also GBPVR seems to be designed from the view of expanding your TVs funcionality rather than MCEs 'Microsoft PC takes your house over' viewpoint and if you aint got broadband you're really cutting MCEs nose off as it seems to assume this and require it in a lot of cases.

plus theres all the rights management rubbish...

by the way, my brother in law has MCE2005 running full-time in his living room. He seems to spend most of his time jumping around the menus mesmerised by the 'swiiiish' and 'swwwoooosh' rather than actually watching any tv. anyone else seen this curious behaviour?

reboot · 2005-12-08, 04:03 PM

Quote:He seems to spend most of his time jumping around the menus mesmerised by the 'swiiiish' and 'swwwoooosh' rather than actually watching any tv. anyone else seen this curious behaviour?

ROFL, oh yes!

andlju · 2005-12-09, 08:08 AM

ricklous Wrote:He seems to spend most of his time jumping around the menus mesmerised by the 'swiiiish' and 'swwwoooosh' rather than actually watching any tv. anyone else seen this curious behaviour?

Been there done that! Smile

Anyway, I completely agree with Capone. For almost everything, MCE is very good. The UI is extremely nice and it is actually quite extensible (but for some strange reason there is no wealth of free plugins).
There are three main reasons why I came back to GBPVR after a few weeks:
1) The recording service in MCE wasn't as stable as the one in GBPVR. (could have been a hardware/driver issue perhaps..)
2) The MCE TV Guide in Sweden only has the most important channels, with GBPVR I can get listings for everything.
3) Commercial skipping was buggy and a bit complicated (requires a plugin called DVRMSToolbox which I didn't like that much).

But there are some positive stuff with MCE too:
1) You can use MPEG2 decoders in hardware mode and still switch aspect ratios (including non-linear stretch of 4:3 to 16:9). This gave me very good video quality.
2) Some of the online features (like video-on-demand etc) are very cool!
3) Did I mention the UI? :p

valkokir · 2005-12-09, 08:21 PM

I tried to set up MCE on a friends machine and I couldn't figure out how to configure anything without going through a Wizard. I HATE Wizards. Just let me change the functions with radio buttons or pull downs, if not then let me just change things in some easy-to-understand code (i.e. config.xml) Was there something I was missing? I think I had less patience than normal because I really had a bad attitude about MCE from the start and I was already running GBPVR very successfully on my own.