What is your take on MCE?

[ingeborgdot]

I have never used MCE but was planning on trying it on a new computer.  What do you think of it compared to pro?

[freelance]

if you want vista the only way to go is ultimate edition. it hase mce too. thats what im doing (and getting it trade too, coz of where i work!)

[Carskick]

I have MCE2005 on our HTPC, and although it has it, we use no feature on it that isn't available on WindowsXP Pro. Media Center won't even work with the Hauppauge PVR150, which is recommended by MS. Dumb.

[Chandler]

In my opinion Media Center is US-centric junk that is difficult to troubleshoot, unreliable in use, and impossible to fix if it breaks (since it's tied into the operating system).  Media Center is incredibly broken for UK DVB-t users and still very flawed for everyone else.  It's intended to replace separate DVD player, TV, PVR yet cannot do basic things such as accept Composite or S-Video inputs when it's configured to receive terrestrial over-the-air TV.  And good look trying to record anything if you're in the UK, because the Guide listings are so broken that you'll quickly be getting your VCR back out, or as I did, purchasing a separate PVR.

That's not to say that all PVR-type applications on the PC are junk.  It's just Media Center and Microsoft's ignorance towards any country other than the US.  The way that things went on during the Release Candidate phase are a perfect example of this, and the end result being that Vista MCE will be coming to the market fundamentally broken (for UK users) without vendors changing their drivers to work in Vista MCE (and breaking support for all previous versions of MCE).  Graeme who develops GB-PVR manages to do a far better job than a whole team of Microsoft programmers, and he's developing by himself in his spare time alongside his day job.