Windows 7 Media Center

[Pob]

yeah thats what I figured. The main advantage of W7 is that fact it's codecs work over here for our freeview|HD. But once installed you drop gbpvr on it. And use that - much better.

The question is, why use Windows 7 at all? I paid for it and installed it, but I struggle to think of any reason to actually use it!
I thought media center might be the 'killer app' but there are just too many shortcomings. Yes the decoders in MC now support H264 and hardware acceleration, but like psycik I found they give a very 'soft' image. The built-in support for 'Iplayer' was attractive - in the UK we were going to get Channel 4 on-demand, Five on demand, and ITV on demand all for free- but at the last minute Sky did a deal with Microsoft and they dropped all of them in favour of Sky's on demand service - which you can only use if you have a Sky subscription or pay Sky a separate monthy fee!
So what other reasons are there to use 7? EVR is one , but I get perfect quality with VMR9FSE - and using PowerDVD decoders I get DXVA acceleration on my Nvidia 8800 in XP.
In fact EVR seemed to cause some new problems - I installed GBPVR in Windows 7, and I found that if I used EVR whatever TV or video was playing would hiccup and judder horribly whenever a menu was overlayed on the screen.
Although 7 is meant to use less resources than Vista, the new install still had 47-odd processes running (compared to about 20 in XP), and has the same habit as Vista of regularly accessing the hard-drives for no apparent reason. I turned of indexing on all drives thinking that might solve it, but it didn't.
The aero windows do look nice though...
In Windows 7 I have now changed the boot order so 'Older version of Windows' is now the default OS. If I can think of some reasons to use 7 in the future I can always change it back.

[psycik]

For a lot of people, (i.e. non gbpvr or media portal) having Windows 7 Media centre means that with the addition of a dvb-t tuner you can be up and running with no external software. In NZ with out Freeview HD (h.264 video, HE-AAC-LC sound) thats a big plus as there are not a lot of apps that support those codecs.

Thats a big positive in a lot of peoples eyes.

[pcostanza]

I like W7. Ain't perfect but I've not had any problems at all. Media Center works well also. Is it perfect? Nope. Do we have any input with MC like GBPVR? Nope. But, for some of us with cable cards, it's near perfect in that regard. When Ceton releases their multi card tuner, you'll be hearing lots about it. For me, a $2 card vs. a $10 DVR rental is a no brainer.

[stustunz]

i prefer XP over windows 7
once ive started the pc gbpvr is loaded and i no longer see it so i dont need it to be flashy

aero does look nice but i compare that to mce it looked nice with its flashy menus but then try and do anything outside the norm and no you cant

Booting fast is what i want and windows 7 doesnt come close to booting as fast as xp in my limited experience with W7
i just like my computers to be snappy screw the flashy crap

so i dont know what ill do when they finally kill xp

[savocanberra]

Used it, its a piece of junk, its really ugly, in turn very slow with the added hard to navigate and missing many features which are in the open source world which are needed in the TV/Media software packages.

The only thing it has going is it picks up most tuners with ease.

Been trying nearly everything on the market that can do Tv and Media, been spending two months of my life and getting annoyed with buggy products and plain stupid navigation and heaving coded applications.

The only product on the market which even comes close to GB-PVR is MediaPortal but then it will crash, then crash some more, then maybe crash again.