Media Center Studio has been released. More to come tonight.
Advent, the developer behind the wildly popular MC Menu Mender for editing Vista Media Center menu strips, has just released his Win7/7MC version of the application – Media Center Studio.
Personally, I’m waiting on Mikinho‘s offering which is supposed to be released sometime tonight. His application is supposed to allow for menu manipulation without any resource editing as in Media Center Studio. You can track its development at TGB here.
I do plan on giving both a try, however, so check in sometime tomorrow for some screens and maybe a quick comparison.
Browser: Firefox 3.0.14 OS: Ubuntu 9.04
Is there a definitive reason why I should upgrade to Win7. In my experiance Windows typically drops the ball when it comes to support when new operating systems come out. But, does MC make a huge stride forward from Vista?
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Jon Reply:
September 16th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I don’t think so, or I would have done it already. I do have one Win7 HTPC, but only because I was out of Vista licenses (it’s an expiring Win7 RTM anyway).
It does bring some new things to the table on the TV side of things, but considering the majority of real HTPC enthusiasts don’t even used the included codecs (like the native h.264 support), it’s not a whole lot more than a face-lift to VMC.
I do believe Win7 to be a little kinder to older systems, so if you have a VMC system that is a bit on the laggy side, a move to Win7 could help a little, but I don’t know that I would go out and buy a full retail-priced copy just to have it right now.
If your Vista Media Center makes you happy, give a little time for things to get worked out and to see your favorite plugins get supported. I think 7MC will eventually be miles better than VMC is/was though.
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Browser: Firefox 2.0.0.20 OS: Windows Vista
I much prefer 7MC to VMC. Just a generally smoother interface and surprisingly less issues. My only problem is that using an external subtitle filter such as vobsub breaks dxva which is a pain in the butt when trying to watch foreign 1080p h264 mkv’s. Hopefully this gets addressed soon.
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Browser: Firefox 3.0.14 OS: Ubuntu 9.04
Jon-
You talk about codecs in your post. What codecs could you recommend I get? I have a rather vanilla system right now and am always looking for ways to increase the video quality.
[Reply]
Jon Reply:
September 17th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
I can’t recommend much since the only system I’m using Win7 on as an HTPC uses the included codecs. It’s my son’s system and he’s 4, so I don’t have much reason to do a whole lot of fiddling with it considering it works.
If you want to try different codecs, then there are plenty out there…it’s getting them registered to work with 7MC. Look up the Win7DSTweaker which allows you to switch between different directshow filters and you can install just about any codec that Vista used. You can try the DivX 7 package, Shark007′s pack (his includes a utility to enable different codecs), MPC-HC h.264 filter, ffdshow, etc.
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