Media Center Gets a Makeover

Having mastered the home office, Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to take over the living room--and every other room--in your house. The company's Windows XP Media Center 2005 operating system, which will come preinstalled on Media Center PCs from companies like Dell, Sony, and HP, acts as a media server that can feed audio and video to any receiving device within network range. But don't trash your TiVo just yet.

The new operating system lays a slightly tweaked version of the original Media Center interface on top of Windows XP Service Pack 2 underpinnings. PCs running it will begin shipping before the holidays. But is Media Center 2005 ready for your living room? To find out, I took a prerelease version out for a spin.

Microsoft says that only 21 percent of previous Media Center-equipped PCs owners used them in the living room. But PCs with the new operating system will be capable of playing, recording, and redistributing multiple video and audio streams over a wired or wireless network to any PC or TV in the house (see Extend Your Reach).

The Media Center PC that I looked at had a single PCI card with dual analog TV tuners. Others, however, will be able to hold two tuner cards--one for analog TV and another for HDTV. With either type of tuner, you can watch, pause, and record live TV shows (using an integrated, online-updated program guide), and you can record two shows simultaneously.

If you can get HDTV content into the box, Media Center 2005 lets you burn it to DVD with a simple right-click command, which last year's OS didn't permit. The new version even supports dual-layer DVD recording, although it won't span discs.

Microsoft admits that the video quality generated by last year's Media Center PCs was not so hot. But this generation of models, it says, will have comb filters in their TV tuner cards, which will help smooth out standard-definition signals; in addition, tuner cards will compress live TV signals at a 9-mbps variable bit rate, up from the fixed 6-mbps rate in last year's models. To my eyes, standard-definition video still didn't look great on either my HDTV or my PC monitor, though that's not unusual for standard-definition content.

Media Center for the Masses?

Media Center is still a computer operating system, so it takes a while to boot up. Although its interface is prettier and easier to use than its predecessor's, you have to resort to Windows occasionally. A Media Center PC running the OS doesn't work as well as many of the consumer electronics devices that it might replace, but it combines many of those devices' functions in one box and gives you the power of a computer, to boot.