So I got my hands on a copy of these updates for Media Center and I’ll be honest, I’m not too thrilled.  The only thing that seems to have benefitted me is the wtv file format.  It shaves a good 5-10% off the file size.  They also changed the setup sequence for tuners a bit, but they still don’t support hybrid tuners.  This means I still have to hack MCE to use my ATI 600 USB.  Supposedly it adds support for ClearQAM broadcasts buy since I live in a college dorm, there is barely cable, let alone ClearQAM.   So once again there is hype and no follow through from Microsoft on one of their flagship products.  I guess all the programmers went to work on IE8.  Let me know if anybody else has had any better experiences.
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Since there is a power outage today that closed school I have had some time to get to doing some things I have been meaning to do for a while.

A few weeks ago I upgraded my laptop hard drive to 320 gigs and upgraded to Vista Ultimate x64 from Vista Business x64.  With this I gained Windows Media Center to use with my TV tuner instead of the worthless ATI software that came with it.  Well I found a few things out about Media Center that drove me up the wall.

One was that it didn’t natively support avi files.  Not a huge deal by itself, so I installed the Xvid codec to get things working.  No dice.  The files played just fine in Windows Media Player, but not in Media Center.  So I figured it had something to do with it being a “3rd party” codec.  So I un-installed it and tried the name brand DiVX codec.  Again, played fine in Media Player but not in Media Center.  So I did some digging and came back to ffdshow, something I haven’t had to use and hadn’t seen since 2004 when I started using VLC for everything.  Tried installing that, again Media Player worked but no Media Center. Read more