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[dunzel]

I was extremely surprised to find that nowhere is it stated up front what operating system Media Center runs on!

I searched the FAQ for Operating System, OS, Op Sys, Platforms with no results! ? I then went to the MC Home Page and found it was not stated there either! ?

All I could find were entries in the FAQ when I searched for "Windows", this led to descriptions of how to run MC a couple of ways on non-Windows platforms. I looked in every major area, link, page I could think of and nowhere does it say what operating system and/or versions Media Center supports!

Isn't this a relatively basic piece of information for 3rd party software?

I was trying to find out if there were any x64 versions, but I guess I'll just have to be surprised...

[glynor]

In the Instructions in the Wiki under Installation and Removal at the very top:

System Requirements:

Hardware Requirements (minimum)
600 MHz Pentium
32 MB RAM
40 MB Free hard drive space
Sound card
Video card
Microsoft Internet Explorer I.E. 5.0 or above
Internet connection (recommended).

Optional extras:
TV Tuner card (for TV playback, recording etc.)
Soundcard with multiple outputs (for multi-zone playback)
CD Writer (Optional) installed and functional for creating CDs
Printer (optional) for printing jewel cases and CD labels

Software Requirements
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista
Microsoft Windows Media Player
RealPlayer, QuickTime and Microsoft DirectX are required to play certain proprietary files through Media Center.

To answer your question though, it does work under both Vista and XP64.  There are well-known problems with many DirectShow filters with 64-bit OSes though (especially XP64), so make sure any DirectShow filters you use are 64-bit OS friendly.

[glynor]

I would agree though that the FAQ link on the main http://www.jrmediacenter.com/ page should link to the Wiki Instructions, rather than to Jim's helper FAQ.  Jim... It'd also be good to add the Wiki link right to the top of your FAQ thread.

[dunzel]

In the Instructions in the Wiki under Installation and Removal at the very top:

To answer your question though, it does work under both Vista and XP64.  There are well-known problems with many DirectShow filters with 64-bit OSes though (especially XP64), so make sure any DirectShow filters you use are 64-bit OS friendly.

Hi!

Thank you for the response! 

When you say "does work under both Vista and XP64", do you mean 32 bit running on x64, or a bona fide x64 version of MC?

thx

[glynor]

Hello as well! 

You'd need an answer from a developer to be absolutely sure, but I believe it is a 32-bit executable.

However, MC easily handles huge libraries without even getting close to touching the 3-4GB RAM ceiling in 32-bit OSes, so that point is fairly irrelevant.  Any other performance benefits that would come from using the full 64-bit registers would be extremely limited in an application like this one.

Why are you curious, specifically?

As far as surprised... I'm not clear here either.  The download (which is available in a sticky thread at the top of this forum) is there and you can download it and try it for 30 days the same as any paid user.  There is no secret hidden download location (or boxed software) for paid users.  We download the same builds as you can!

I'd say go ahead and give it a try.  If you have any problems you believe related to 64-bit Vista (or anything really) come back here and let us know.  The developers heavily monitor these forums and if there is a serious 64-bit related issue that is MC's "fault", I'm sure they'll look into it.

[dunzel]

I would agree though that the FAQ link on the main http://www.jrmediacenter.com/ page should link to the Wiki Instructions, rather than to Jim's helper FAQ.  Jim... It'd also be good to add the Wiki link right to the top of your FAQ thread.

Better still, not a link, but some sort of statement re: supported platforms/versions. Or a link entitled something like "Supported Platforms/Versions" that links to a page with more detailed information.

My thrust is, something to let the "new viewer" see where to look to find out if they can even run the product. It's pretty rare (daresay, non-existent! ) to have to search so hard to find out what a product runs on.

[glynor]

I agree there!  Actually, I've been similarly frustrated with other applications when trying to determine if it would run on OSX vs. Windows.

[glynor]

I should also mention that MC (and the free "sibling" MJ) is heavily multi-threaded and takes full advantage of multi-core processors (including quad-core CPUs).  Again, the achillies heel is that sometimes the third-party decoding filters do not, but MC does for everything under its control.

[dunzel]

Hello as well! 

You'd need an answer from a developer to be absolutely sure, but I believe it is a 32-bit executable.

However, MC easily handles huge libraries without even getting close to touching the 3-4GB RAM ceiling in 32-bit OSes, so that point is fairly irrelevant.  Any other performance benefits that would come from using the full 64-bit registers would be extremely limited in an application like this one.

Why are you curious, specifically?

As far as surprised... I'm not clear here either.  The download (which is available in a sticky thread at the top of this forum) is there and you can download it and try it for 30 days the same as any paid user.  There is no secret hidden download location (or boxed software) for paid users.  We download the same builds as you can!

I'd say go ahead and give it a try.  If you have any problems you believe related to 64-bit Vista (or anything really) come back here and let us know.  The developers heavily monitor these forums and if there is a serious 64-bit related issue that is MC's "fault", I'm sure they'll look into it.

There definitely is a marked performance difference when an application is 64 bit as opposed to 32 bit. It's not just the size of the registers, it's the whole operating system paradigm (for more in depth information see Intel's site for QuadCore). Applications built to run on x64 take advantage of the advanced threading and processor sharing.

You won't see too much of a difference between 32 bit and 64 bit in isolation on an x64 machine, the big difference comes when there's a lot going on in multiple areas. Heavy processor loads as well as a high number of resource intensive applications.

For example, viewing/listening to multimedia entertainment (say, in MC) while building a library and an application (say, in Visual C++ 2008 Express) also running a web server update in an ftp client, composing a tutorial in Adobe Captivate, and searching for instances of "\bunsigned char *[\w]*\s?;?$" on the C: drive (say, with PowerGREP). There will be a difference in performance if any or all of these are 32 bit as opposed to being 64 bit! 

[dunzel]

I agree there!  Actually, I've been similarly frustrated with other applications when trying to determine if it would run on OSX vs. Windows.

True, Mac has historically been quite parochial, assuming that any Mac owner Knows what are Mac applications and not Mac applications! 

They have been a bit less so recently, what with the advent of Intel processors on Mac's! 

But, I guess this is getting to be a bit OT so I'll stop here...

[glynor]

Yeah... I'm well aware of many of these claims.

Be skeptical when reading Intel's marketing claims though.  A whole lot of those benefits listed are mixed between different aspects of "64-bit support".  For example, multitasking performance improvements under a 64-bit system are almost entirely due to the OS and are only extremely marginally impacted by individual applications (as long as they don't ever violate their memory ceiling and need to page out to disk).  Another example is the multi-threading stuff, which has extremely little to do with "64-bit" and can be accomplished in a 32-bit executable just as easy as it can be in a 64-bit.  The entire beauty of the Vista64 method is that it runs 32-bit applications better than Vista32 in many cases.  This has nothing to do with a specific applications' level of support.

In all apples-to-apples, non-biased, performance comparisons I've seen, there are two main factors that determine if an application will substantially benefit from a 64-bit native executable:

1. Memory usage (Photoshop, MySQL, and Crysis would like 64-bit executables, Notepad and Firefox don't care).
2. The mix of long-integer and double-precision floating-point math that is done by the application (video compressors and other "heavy number crunchers" benefit here, most general purpose home-user applications do not because they are all written with the 32-bit operating system in mind and more precision isn't needed).

EDIT: Again... I have no idea if building a true 64-bit EXE for MC would make any difference.  I don't have access to the source code and can't run any profiles on it to see if it would.  My guess is that it would in very limited situations, but that the extremely efficient memory management schemes they use limit the impact of any benefits to people with truly enormous libraries (and I mean huge).  But that is just a fairly uneducated guess.

[dunzel]

Yeah... I'm well aware of many of these claims.

Actually, they're not claims, I was referring to things I've experienced on my own systems. The scenario described and the applications involved (mostly, excepting MC) is an actual case.

I understand where you're coming from, though. I heard much of the same pro and con discussion when Intel went from 16 to 32 bit. Change is difficult for everyone!  We all look for very good reasons before we indulge in something new. At least I did when I switched from 32 to 64! 

[KingSparta]

dunzel Your Handle Is Similar To "Captain Dunsel" In Star Trek The Show "The Ultimate Computer"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Computer 

[dunzel]

dunzel Your Handle Is Similar To "Captain Dunsel" In Star Trek The Show "The Ultimate Computer"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Computer 

... Oh, really! ... 

[hit_ny]

In all apples-to-apples, non-biased, performance comparisons I've seen, there are two main factors that determine if an application will substantially benefit from a 64-bit native executable:

1. Memory usage (Photoshop, MySQL, and Crysis would like 64-bit executables, Notepad and Firefox don't care).
2. The mix of long-integer and double-precision floating-point math that is done by the application (video compressors and other "heavy number crunchers" benefit here, most general purpose home-user applications do not because they are all written with the 32-bit operating system in mind and more precision isn't needed).
s libraries (and I mean huge).  But that is just a fairly uneducated guess.

..and that pretty much sums up what 64 bit gives you, more space to address in memory. Great if you're a server, less so if you're not.

16->32 was defnitely more significant than 32->64 IMO.

Course we know how apps get bloated and slow whilst in former incarnations they were quite zippy, the term used to describe this phenomenon is progress 

[glynor]

Course we know how apps get bloated and slow whilst in former incarnations they were quite zippy, the term used to describe this phenomenon is progress 

Second-system effect.