XP MEDIACENTER EDITION 2005 MOVIE
XP MEDIACENTER EDITION 2005 PC
XP MEDIACENTER EDITION 2005 PLUS
XP MEDIACENTER EDITION 2005 SERIES

The tools are simple and effective, better than at least some of the third-party reference videos used by video technicians when setting up home theater systems.

XP MEDIACENTER EDITION 2005 SERIES

And the single most dazzling feature of MCE 2004 is the display calibration wizard, a painstakingly produced series of videos that you watch while setting screen centering and sizing, aspect ratio, contrast, brightness, and color balance.

Of course, all those options don't count for much if the picture quality isn't very good. Best of all, the robust Microsoft guide remains free, unlike subscription-based PVR services such as TiVo and RePlay. What Microsoft calls enhanced Record History, a troubleshooting feature, tells you in detail why a show didn't get saved (such as user cancellation or a bad video signal). The keyword-record capability lets you record shows based on a category, show title, actor name, or director name. The new version's conflict management lets you decide which conflicting show gets recording priority, or you can let the guide determine if one of your choices is being repeated during the two-week span of the program guide and defer recording that program. You can now start recording shows a few minutes early and end a few minutes late compared to the listed time, though of course there's still no solution for the possibility of overtime in sports events except recording an extra hour just in case. Similarly, a listing of separate recorded episodes of the same program can be collapsed into a single listing, which can greatly help to reduce scrolling. You can make a 100-channel cable guide more manageable by filtering to show just sports, movies, or children's shows, for instance. The TV guide and video recorder are smarter in MCE 2004. This is a welcome change, as some users found the default blue-on-blue text of the first MCE interface a bit hard to read on TVs. If a TV is your primary or only display, you can select a high-contrast background.

XP MEDIACENTER EDITION 2005 PLUS

Press the My TV button and you see an inset displaying the channel you're watching, plus buttons for selecting a television guide, a program search function, TV settings, and a list of the last three shows you've recorded.

XP MEDIACENTER EDITION 2005 MOVIE

Start Menu choices are Play DVD, Online Spotlight (not active, but promised to be a link to a Microsoft site offering news, weather, promos, online music and movie downloads), My Video, My Pictures, My TV (live TV and PVR), My Music, Radio (on some systems), More Programs (for third-party apps), Settings, and the two most recently used items from More Programs. You can use a keyboard (most MCE machines come with a wireless keyboard and mouse) but you generally don't have to, except to surf the Web from the couch or to clear the occasional application error message (hey, this is still a Windows OS, after all).

XP MEDIACENTER EDITION 2005 PC

Video card choices will have a major impact on quality.Īs before, an MCE PC boots to what's called a 10-foot interface, meaning the fonts are big enough to be read from across the room, and selections can be made from a remote control. For this story, Microsoft provided us with a white box system from its labs so that we could get an early look at the OS. As to whether picture quality is markedly improved in this version, let's just say the jury's still out until we see final-production MCE machines from PC makers. Microsoft says MCE 2004 allows for better-quality TV as well-an important point, since the soft-focus picture quality found in the first batch of MCE PCs left us wanting. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security Softwareīut with MCE 2004, Microsoft did the most significant work on the TV and PVR (personal video recorder) sections.

Xp mediacenter edition 2005