CZroe - Sunday, Octolink 'Windows MCE will never be any use for people serious about video until it allows you to select what codecs you want to use for encoding from all the DirectShow codecs installed on your system.Our original article on Windows XP Media Center Edition as we will not be rehashing most of the information covered Investigate the performance of the OS and find out how fast of a system you Look at it to not only evaluate the changes made to the OS, but also to finally Today marks the official launch of MCE 2005 and although there have alreadyīeen reports on what's new in the updated OS, we've taken an in-depth Only to be serviced in the latest version of Microsoft's Media Center OS - MCE There were still numerous features missing from the MCEĮquation, things like HDTV and multiple tuner support were left unaddressed, MCE 2004 was not an example of perfection, rather an example of the direction Update to the OS: MCE 2004, which provided bug fixes, performance enhancementsĪnd introduced a few new tweaks and features to the OS. In between MCE's maiden launch and today, Microsoft released a much-needed In making the Athlon 64 an extremely high performer when it came to Media Center The on-die memory controller would prove to be very helpful The introduction of the Athlon 64 provided a nice, very powerful, very capableĪlternative to the Pentium 4 with one very important feature - an on-die And the price of CPUs went down, as the power of CPUs went up. Had to buy it with some sort of hardware to make it look like you were buyingĪ PC with it. Places likeīegan selling the Media Center remote control, with the stipulation that you Of the copy of the OS, the rest of the items became much easier. Things have changed however, and while it was still difficult to get a hold You had to have one of the fastestĬPUs available on the market, which at the time was around a Pentium 4 3GHz.Īnd you had to have the MCE remote control setup, which also wasn't readily Then times have changed, mostly thanks to MCE). You had to have a hardware MPEG-2Įncoder card, which at the time of the release of MCE was far from common (since

Keeping that barrier to entry nice and high. Even though some managed to get it (through MSDNĪnd other less legal routes), there were relatively steep hardware requirements

Launched, it's no surprise that the Microsoft OS has not taken off byĭistributed only to OEMs for use in custom built systems, this wasn't an As impressed as we were with Windows XP Media Center Edition when it first

Windows media center for xp free