Windows Media Center 2005 to support high def TV

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Windows Media Center 2005 to support high def TV

Great news: Windows Media Center 2005 to support high def TV. Seems obvious at this point, but good to hear official word on it.

I'm curious how the HD TiVo vs a new media center box would stack up, as Thomas' review highlighted the lack of high def support for media center. In terms of upgradability, I bet a windows media center box would be much easier to dump an extra 250Gb drive into. We'll have to wait until these are released and in the wild before knowing if Microsoft finally has a hit on their hands.

by Matt Haughey September 14, 2004 in Windows Media Center XP

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I'm no expert, but a buddy of mine is. :) According to Mark, (http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/7706137582525561/") Media Center supports HD playback today, right off the shelf.

Posted by: Kevin Donahue at Sep 14, 2004 12:48:50 PM

Playback through media player 10, yes, but not recording or watching of live HDTV.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Sep 14, 2004 2:31:19 PM

The ATI HDTV Wonder only supports ATSC (over the air) broadcasts. So unless you can receive these, the D* HDTivo is still more functional (I can record HBO-HD, Bravo-HD, CBS-HD, and soon NBC-HD and FOX-HD on my HDTivo).

Note also that the limitation of only handling ATSC broadcasts means you can't use the card with your unencrypted cable line's HD channels, since most Cable Co's are using QAM encoding, which won't work with this card.

Cablecard availability early next year may make it possible for ATI or someone to produce a device that could work with what the cableco's are sending, or someone may invent a chipset capable of encoding 1080i (or even 720p) in realtime from a component video source...but until then, the HD support in PVRs is going to be limited to purpose-built devices like the HDTivo and VOOM's HD PVR (if it ever gets released)...

Posted by: Steve Dossick at Sep 14, 2004 2:41:10 PM

This is very interesting and very good news indeed and may be the solution for those who can't or don't want to use DirecTV as their HD content provider. Just remember though, don't always believe what you read. Remember it was on the eve of the consumer electronics show that earlier this year that another fine publication, the Reigister, claimed that Microsoft was deep sixing the product entirely http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/06/whatever_happened_to_the_windows/

I'd love to hear confirmation from Microsoft on this but until then I remain optimistically skeptical... but very optimistically.

In order for this to be real support for HDTV as well it would need to work with HD Satellite boxes as well as HD cable boxes. Just to provide over air support would not be enough as most people these days get their content from cable or satellite providers. I'm really looking forward to how this story develops.

Tom

Posted by: Thomas Hawk at Sep 15, 2004 5:56:36 AM

Infoworld is reporting a March 12th announcement date for MCE 2005. http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/09/15/HNmediacenterupdate_1.html

Not sure why the spacing on my post above appears to be off but apologies.

Tom

Posted by: Thomas Hawk at Sep 15, 2004 10:15:12 AM

It would be cool if it supported this HTDV over cable card - even if it is only unencrypted channels right now.

http://www.copperbox.com/lite/fusion3.php

Posted by: MattBrink at Sep 15, 2004 11:43:31 AM

The problem with supporting cable and satellite boxes is the "broadcast" flag int he HDTV standard. Until that can be resolved, no external PVR (e.g., non-integrated, unlike a DTivo or VOOM box) is goign to be feasible.

And I don't know that I'd call a DTivo "more" functional than MCE2005... just "differently" functional. DTivo doesn't have the extender support that MCE2005 does (although VOOM's box will have something similar), for example, allowing one MCE box to become a digital hub for the rest of your house.

Posted by: Don Jones at Oct 17, 2004 8:14:16 AM

ewrtet

Posted by: turki at Oct 22, 2005 2:35:02 PM

Windows Media Center 2005 to support high def TV

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