The thing that all of these media centers don’t do is get rid of all those remotes. Everything is redundant, right? I mean why do you need a surround sound decoder on your VCR or HD DVD player if you already have that capacity from your TV? And why bother feeding a preamped audio signal into your receiver if all you need are powered speakers? Why bother buying a TiVo if your Apple TV has a 180 GIG hard drive?

My ideal set up would be a menu-driven system with one remote — like Apple’s remote only non-IR please — and something like a mac mini that could play, rip and/or record DVDs, HD DVDs and any other kind of video including off-the-air digital HD TV. This device should be able to send surround sound signals to powered speakers (like a Bose system) when needed. And, of course, you should be able to play games with a couple of wireless game controllers. No external receiver, DVD player, VTR, VPR, or TV tuner. Anybody else on board?

A friend of mine went the Windows Media Center route and got an HP Pavillion notebook computer with WIndows XP Media Center Edition 2005 preinstalled that is also Windows Vista ready. I don’t blame my friend wanting more features but think I made the better choice as more features will be added to Front Row over time and is more simple to manage and navigate content than Media Center. The Mac Mini is a cheap yet reliable, and efficient desktop computer at the low-end of the market for people that want a Mac desktop but don’t want the high-end iMacs or Mac Pro computers and don’t want a notebook from Apple either. Mac Mini is best for people like me who already have our own peripherals to plug into the computer.

Mac Mini is also good for multimedia as I said — its even better than Apple TV which is a stripped down Mac Mini designed for HDTVs as it supports more video codecs and functions as a device that can play media and/or enable computing.

Apple TV works better as a media extender than a computer — the computer features are unavailable unless you tried hacking the system.

I use my Mac Mini with my video iPod and plan to upgrade to OS X Leopard 10.5 Family Pack. I only use a Windows PC to play hard core games (I need ability to customize hardware myself to improve game performance, graphics etc something unavailable on Macs), record TV with my TV Tuner capture card (find capture cards are better than USB TV Tuners have tried both with Windows and PC TV Tuner capture cards have better quality than USB TV Tuners (tried an AverMedia USB based TV Tuner but replaced it with a better ATI TV Wonder VE that works with VirtualDub on WIndows and use Huffyuv video codec for encoding video during capture process), I expect a Mac based TV Tuner (since they’re all USB) will function like my old AverMedia based tuner and give lower quality capture.

I reccommend the following read: (link) “Windows XP Media Center Edition vs. Apple TV” this compares Microsoft products to Apple media solutions and discusses WebTV becoming MSN TV how it was a great product but Microsoft ruined it, the emergence of XBox game systems from Microsoft and the arrival of WIndows Media Center compare that to cable TV company DVRs and those of TiVO plus Apple TV review. It says Microsoft doesn’t like competition because its a poor competitor. Even when they make a successful product if consumers buy a Microsoft product like Media Center they expand into nw markets and crush competitors. MS has an unfair advantage they monopolize the market completely not allowing competition.

That is why I try to stay away from Microsoft products. Have never used MSN TV even when it was Web TV but would have considered using it in future if still Web TV, never used XBox and never used Media Center. If Microsoft makes a good product I still look for better products because this is Microsoft the evil empire from Redmond Washington. To make matters worse when people buy Microsoft products and then complain about limitations its their fault for buying them in the first place and if you go to buy an alternative product but Microsoft already killed the alternatives your forced to go with Microsoft.

Microsoft it can be argued also is not that good at making hardware products anyways. Their better in software but even their software is not best in the world take the consumer adoption of iTunes over Windows Media Player or iPods over WIndows Media based devices, success of Mozilla Firefox which helped restart the browser wars after Microsoft killed Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer with WIndows forced Microsoft to finally innovate IE. Their was no new features or nothing special about IE 5 after all compared to IE 6. Microsoft was forced if they wanted to keep market share to release IE 7 as an innovative browser. WHen Microsoft is forced to innovate they do but otherwise they don’t. IE 6 had nothing innovayive about it compared to IE 5.

Same could be said about Windows 98 compared to WIndows 95 was just WIndows 95 with Internet Explorer bundled. No new major features in the OS itself besides the bundling of IE application.

So I try to stay away from buying Microsoft products even when they are good to help underdogs out and Apple in some cases is still an underdog with its Mac computer business although it is growing its OS market share is less than Windows. Sometimes going for the underdog is not entirely neccessary but supporting companies less monopolistic than Microsoft are.

I support Apple to strike a blow at Microsoft. Sure Microsoft supports Apple’s Mac business — Apple’s success is both good and bad news for Microsoft but in the bad news perspective I support Apple to oppose the will of Microsoft.

Mac Mini is a much better media center computer than any with Microsoft’s OS offerings preinstalled. My next Mac will probably be an iMac and maybe Apple TV and iPhone eventually.

I wrote in an August blog that the trick is to enter the living room with a a single-purpose machine that works really well, then pile on the additional apps slowly, methodically.

Tivo and Apple provide good lessons for this approach, although it took Tivo way too long to implement.

See:

TiVo Lesson for Living Room: One Function at a Time
“Now that TiVo has released a developers’ kit, new apps are pouring in. It could be a lesson for makers of all-purpose machines. Maybe start with a great single-purpose device, then grow from there?”
(link)

Ok, so Apple goes ahead and releases a single software that pretty much undermines most of the push behind Microsoft’s Media Center Edition of Windows XP.
WooHoo!
I could almost go ahead and whisper that Apple copied M$, but wait … they …

You can read the article by going directly to our blog.

(link)

If a varient of FrontRow could be run from the iPod that could provide a very simple and compelling solution for most consumers. Get rid of the difficulties of the home network, by using the more reliable human-powered network.

Download to PC, sync to iPod, watch on TV.

(link)