Windows MCE 2005 – First impressions

May 18, 2006 by Oliver
Filed under: Computers, Entertainment, Technology 

I said I’d write about it yesterday. Well I was so busy actually using it that I forgot :P

The first thing I should point out is that Microsoft do not officially support home users installing MCE themselves and as such I have an OEM copy. Despite that the installation was painless although it does have it’s oddities. Most notable is that the installation makes no mention of MCE, it just says “Windows XP Professional”. Also unlike other versions of Windows this comes on two disks, the second disk containing the media center stuff as well as some table PC stuff. One final comment about installing is the disks are labeled (system-wise) incorrectly). It will ask you to install “Windows XP Service Pack 2 disk” when it really means “Put disk 1 back in”.

Since I don’t yet have a TV card I can’t use much of the really cool functionality of media center, but I did try playing a DVD and immediately hit problems. My DVD drive came with PowerDVD which is not supported by media center. Or to be more precise PowerDVD 5, the version I have, isn’t compatible. If you plan to build an MCE PC it is vital you have a compatible MPEG 2.0 decoder (All the options I’ve seen have been software but I would assume older machines with hardware decoder cards will work). So I downloaded a trial of PowerDVD 6 (which uninstalled my OEM version 5) and everything worked. Unfortunately version 6 isn’t free.

Windows, DVD

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Comments

5 Comments on Windows MCE 2005 – First impressions

  1. RyanC on Thu, 18th May 2006 1:54 pm

    2. Neither is version 5 I think, but you just happened to have had it bundled with your DVD drive…

    I don’t think they’re that expensive, but its an additional cost :S

  2. Oliver on Thu, 18th May 2006 2:43 pm

    3. I just found that ATI provide a DVD decoder that I can download (you need an ATI drivers CD to install it) :)

    Although nVidia just provide one on the disk…

  3. RyanC on Fri, 19th May 2006 2:28 pm

    4. Why not just include one optimised by the OS maker for the Operating System – Microsoft are you listening?

  4. Oliver on Fri, 19th May 2006 3:31 pm

    5. Considering Microsoft generally try to bundle as much as possible I’m guessing there is a good reason for them not to, presumably some legal problem…

    Wikipedia talks of a possible reason:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD#Content-scrambling_system

  5. WinTV TV tuner despatched - Oliver Brown on Mon, 29th May 2006 5:06 pm

    6. [...] er despatched
    May 29th, 2006 by Oliver

    I’ll be able to extend my short Media Center review into something a little longer and more useful wh [...]