Part 1. Windows Media Center
“Out Of The Box” 
By Deck Hazen
Hazen Consulting
The purpose of this portion of the Hazen website is to take a detailed look at Windows Media Center (WMC) as offered in Windows 7. We'll look at the main features as well as some of the short-comings and explain how some of these short-comings can be overcome with the application of 3rd party software.
Our conclusion is that WMC provides an easy and attractive console for many of your digital entertainment sources – movies, TV, radio, music, photos – and more. Only one remote control is needed to drive the whole system, it looks great, there are a host of plug-ins and add-ons to fill a few gaps in it's functionality, and it’s free with the Windows 7 operating system.
BackGround
Just in the last year or so (currently 2010) there has been a striking rise in the number of products aimed at the "Media Center" market, and there are quite a few "Media Center-type" programs available at the moment in addition to the Windows Media Center program built in to Windows 7.
Most do many of the same sorts of things. Some feature enhancements for collecting material from the Internet, others focus on movies etc. After trialling many of these, Windows Media Center came out the winner mainly for its ability to do the main jobs well, and allowing 3rd parties to take care of any shortcomings.
The "holy grail" for any media system is to one box that does everything - movies, pictures, music, radio, TV Shows, news, home videos, podcasts, etc. And all driven from a single remote control.
In the past, most media junkies would have had to make-do with home entertainment centres and a collection of different components, most of which didn’t talk to the others. Watching TV was one set of components, listening to music was another (another 3 if your music collection included tape, CD, and vinyl), watching a movie yet another. To keep track of it, some will have tried a parade of media cataloguing programs - spent hours plugging in discs and typing out descriptions, and to control it, many of us would have played with programmable remote control units that tried to combine our media sources into one unit.
Just recently, Media Center programs have come into their own, and although it’s still early days for this technology (there is still a fair amount of work required to setup of the system and fine tune it) there is reason to believe that while a bit of technical know-how is required to set up a good system today – a plug-and-play system for non-technical users can’t be too far off.
Out of the box, WMC does a pretty respectable job of organizing the media on your disc -- Movies, music, pictures - it can handle most of the popular formats for each. But when you combine the base system with a handful of 3rd party add-on packages the Windows Media Centre really starts to shine.
OverView
In this section we’ll run through the main components of WMC as they come with Windows 7. Those components include:
- Movies
- TV
- Radio
- Music
- Pictures
- Video
- And Games
Movies:
If you have a collection of movies on DVDs that are not copy-protected, you can copy those movies over to your hard drive where they will be made immediately available through WMC
and if you allow WMC to collect information from the Internet, you will get back a wealth of information about each title. This information is called “meta-data” – this is “data about the data” – in this case, additional information about each of the movies in your collection. For starters, as you can see from the screen shot above, you will get not only the Title, but the genre, the Production year, the Rating, the type of file (for example, “AVI” format or DVD format) and the date you added the title to your collection - you also get the cover art and all of the available "background" images (not shown, but we will discuss later).
You can then use this to sort your collection into smaller, more manageable groups making it easier to find the title you are after.
Everyone is familiar with the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and some of their information makes its way into Media Center database, but mostly (it appears) by way of the “the Movie Database (TMDb)”. That information is provided free of charge and the service relies on contributions from users to keep the data current and accurate rather like a “wiki” .
More on this a bit later.
TV:
To include the TV section here is a bit misleading as in fact, a TV tuner card is required to make use of the software that is included. With the addition of a card, WMC becomes a superb “DVR” (Digital Video Recorder) -- much like the "Tivo" or "My Sky" products now on the market. Out of the box, a properly configured setup should allow you to view and capture the Electronic Program Guide (“EPG”) from the 13 broadcast channels now transmitted by “FreeView”. TV from other sources, like Sky TV, can also be seen by passing the signal from the Sky Decoder Box, through the TV Tuner card.
This screen shot contains a few added enhancements that will be discussed later; the important point to note here is that the availability of EPG data allows you to do a lot more with your TV viewing time.
Radio:
Assuming your TV Tuner Card can also pick up radio stations, you can “preset” your local stations.
Chatter on the Internet suggests that most people would like to have the ability to add station logos to replace the generic blue boxes, but no word as yet (that I could find) on when this ability might be forthcoming.
Music:
In much the same way that movie data is captured and presented, so too is your music collection organized. Many users of Windows Media Player will be familiar with its ability to fetch song, album, songwriter, and musician information from fai.music.metaservice.microsoft.com for use in the WMP Library, and WMC uses the same technology.
In fact, the Media Player does the actual "playing" of the file -- WMC acts as a front door.
Pictures:
WMC can store your digital photo collection, but unlike commercial movies or albums; "metadata" about the photos must come largely from the user.
There are, however, a few modest tools (shown below) that add a bit of utility to what would otherwise be a very basic slide show program. What's needed are a few extra tools like the simple editing tools offered in Picasa 3, DigiBookShelf, or Studio Line PhotoBasic3. Even just a link to your existing photo editor would be big help.
Videos:
And, of course, the same applies to your home movies. Out of the box, WMC supports a number of file formats (see the Appendix for the current list). And as noted, other formats (like High Definition MKV videos) can be played with additional 3rd party software.
Games:
What would a Windows system be without Solitaire?
Some of the games have undergone considerable face-lifting from their 2-dimensional predecessors:
Conclusion:
Out of the box, Windows Media Center has a lot to offer. Now that the world has become a digital playground, WMC provides a very nice Command and Control centre. When combined with a few 3rd party software add-ons, WMC becomes a top-flight Media Center package, well worth a second look for anyone interested in setting up a centralized digital entertainment hub.
All that’s required is a PC that will run Windows 7, (but of course, the beefier the better), a big screen TV, a TV Tuner card, a connect ion to the Internet, and a bit of time to set it all up.
And to keep the wife happy, you don’t even have to locate the PC in the lounge. With the addition of one of the many “Extender” devices on the market today (priced in the $200 to $400 area) only a small box, perhaps the size of the paperback version of “War and Peace” is required. The extender hooks up to your TV and sound system and provides some of the facilities of the PC via a data link (wireless or hard wired), a local hard drive, or a USB storage device. It has its own remote that controls the whole extender system. We'll look at extenders later in this review.