So about a week or two ago I installed Vista Ultimate on my home PC, and then realized that I could now use Windows Media Center and my Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender. I set it up, turned it on and was blown away by how good the interface looked and responded.
I quickly (hastily?) made the decision to switch over to MCE from JRiver's Theater View. I figured that, on top of the shiny interface, I could also get rid of a PC in my living room. The only problem with this was that I had a lot of files in a lot of different formats and I knew that MCE wouldn't support them all. No biggie. WMA has a lossless version and a quick test showed that MCE could even handle gapless playback of WMA Lossless. The Media Center Extender, on the other hand, couldn't. Oh, well, it's a small price to pay for the flashiness of MCE's interface. I vowed that once I had everything else figured out, I would task my PC with the lengthy process of converting all of my APE files to WMA. But there were other hurdles to tackle first.
I quickly noticed that, unlike MC, there was no customizing the views in MCE. Not a big deal for music, as my needs there are really simple, but trading in all of my image and video based view schemes for a simple folder structure based view was going to take some getting used to. I glanced up at that beautiful screen full of animated goodness and decided I could live without my view schemes. But strangely enough, no videos were showing up.
I realized, of course, that MCE wasn't going to handle Quicktime or some of the oddball codecs that my collection utilized, but I knew for a fact that I at least had some WMV's in my collection. After some running back and forth to my Vista PC, I found that, while they were WMV files, they were using an audio codec that the Xbox didn't understand. So unless I could convert them somehow, they would be unavailable. Well, no big loss. They weren't that important anyway. But what of the rest?
I scanned through my video collection, identifying videos would absolutely need to be converted and began downloading video conversion utilites in hopes of finding one that was capable of converting all of my videos to WMV. After a few attempts, success! Now I just had to experiment with it to find the settings that would convert my videos over and not lose too much quality, while also balancing drive space requirements. Once I found those settings I could start my PC on the long, laborious task of converting my videos and hope for the best.
At some point in my odyssey to migrate to MCE I took a look back at everything I'd have to sacrifice in order to make this transition. In order to lose an extra PC in the living room and gain the pretty interface I'd have to give up gapless playback and customizable view schemes and spend countless hours converting music and videos over to Windows Media format and more than likely have to give up half of my collection that wouldn't make the transition to a suitable format. Not to mention the other things I was starting to dabble in, like RSS bitorrent downloading of TV shows in HD that I could only get in SD through my cable provider. These videos are all encoded in DivX or Xvid, so they'd have to then be converted to WMV so I could watch them.
After careful consideration of the facts, I could only say one thing. "Screw that."
So now I'm back to my "ugly" Betty, MC's Theater View. Proving once again that I'm the type to ultimately pick brains and personality over beauty any day of the week. Sometimes I think I'm bound and determined to find a better alternative to MC out there, but there just isn't one.
Author
Topic: The Prodigal Son Returns (Read 3191 times)