I want to paint a picture of what I thought the Media Center PC is for, what I set mine up to do, and why I am not so frustrated with the Media Center “vision” that is coming from Redmond.
About a year ago I swapped a friend out of an HP Windows XP Media Center Edition box. This was the real deal, complete with remote control, TV tuner card, etc. I set it up to an HP LCD TV, got the Microsoft Media Center wireless keyboard and was set.
It was really a nice setup, you had a decent 1280×768 resolution, could sit back and browse the web and run iTunes comfortably (Media Center doesn’t handle large MP3 libraries well at all). All was well in Media Center land until a strange thing started happening. Computer makers started putting Media Center on everything. Regular desktops with no TV Tuners were first, then every notebook HP offers basically ran Media Center. When I got a new Core Duo laptop, sans tuner of course, it had Media Center on it and a remote!
This is where the confusion came in. Does Media Center belong in your living room or in your office? What was the goal for it? When the Media Center Extenders became available I assumed that was to stream content from your living room to other rooms of the house. I didn’t see it as “Stream content from your desktop computer to the living room.”
Enter Xbox 360
Here is where I got really confused with the whole Media Center thing. I got an Xbox 360 for Christmas. When you start looking into hooking all of it up, you come into some serious oddities. Consider that we are talking about a current model Mitsubishi 1080p DLP TV here:
- I cannot connect my Media Center PC AND my Xbox 360 to the TV at the same time unless I am willing to give up 1080p. Microsoft decided it was smart (I think it makes no sense at all) to make the Xbox 360 only spit 1080p video out of an analog 15-pin VGA cable. I have to place a DVI adapter on the cable just to plug it to a TV that has everything from DVI, HDMI, Cable Card, FireWire, whatever. Why is there no HDMI support for Xbox 360?
This really does boggle me. HDMI seems to be truly the standard for HD TV signals and Microsoft won’t even comment on HDMI support coming?
So now that I safely tuck away my Media Center PC into a closet or office, I come into new problems.
- Xbox 360 does not have a web browser. Is Xbox Live! the only reason to use the Internet in your living room? Does the average user not need access to the Internet in the living room?
- Does Microsoft assume I only want to be able to instant message Xbox Live! Gold users and that I want to do it with a clunky onscreen keyboard with my controller?
Now I want to say I love my Xbox 360, I really do. But Microsoft is really making the Media Center waters muddy here. I hate to say Apple here, but Microsoft could take some notes from Steve Jobs on how to put together seamless end to end solutions. I don’t want to go out and buy the latest console, the latest TV, and the latest media center PC only to find out that they can’t be used together. So Microsoft, answer me this….
Where is my Media Center PC supposed to be? Or does 1080p mean 1080possible (not practical)
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The fact that MS released an HD game console with no HDMI support has angered a lot of people including myself! However, there is hope coming down the road! My only wish is that MS doesn’t screw over the early adopters by NOT releasing an HDMI cable. I sure as hell am not going to buy a version 2 360 just to get HDMI.
This screen shot looks legit to me!
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/05/the-second-xbox-360-revealed-codename-zephyr/