This brought back some horrible memories of dealing with disgusting anti-consumer DVD region locking, Windows Media Center (later versions at least) would allow a limited number of region changes which you could abuse to reset the counter but it was still a pain to constantly have to switch and reset, soon found out that software like VLC just ignored region locking, never looked back.
Nowadays it´s a pain to play blu rays. DVD and BD formats won´t play in Windows 10 out of the box anymore and BD in particular never did as far as i know. But we have MakeMKV and it literally copies the disk and puts it in a flexible mkv file which can be played using Media Player or VLC. So i don´t even try to play them directly. Another benefit: I put the files on my network storage and access it easily on my Android TV.
This is actually a hardware limitation built into most DVD drives. But there is a tool called MCSE that allows you to patch the firmware to remove that restriction. Sadly the same is not possible for blu-ray...
Same here. I miss that old machine I used back then. I still have it, but towards the end of its use, it started suffering major slowdowns and the hard drives were making a bunch of sad hard drive noises. They're probably long since dead by now.
That's the edition I used. I had a Haupagge USB tuner connected to it. I also used my Xbox 360 as a client on another tv. It was great and I used it until I bought a Windows 7 pro PC that had media center standard. That one used both the USB tuner and a networked HD Homerun dual tuner. I really liked it better than my TiVo.
Isn't that what everyone else got funneled to? I remember our early HP MCE machine having the "Media Center Edition" branding on the boot animation, but that ultimately got replaced by the "Windows XP" with the blue loading bar, normal SP3 info on winver, etc.
Saaaame here. Too bad that I didn't have the Windows XP Media Center Edition on my computer, but good think that Windows XP (with SP3 of course) was the first operating system that I was using when I was a little kid.
I used Vista's Media Center a ton back in the day and it was definitely my favorite version. With a Hauppauge dual tuner I was loving life. That is until our cable company encrypted all of their channels and the fun came to an abrupt end.
I remember the magic of getting my first hardware MPEG2 encoder Hauppauge card and MS OEM MCE remote. Too bad there's no MCE anymore, but the remote still works perfectly with Win10/11.
@@resolvanlemmy Not many people share that opinion lol. It was TERRIBLE when it was released. The system requirements were too high and builders were bringing out computers that could barely run it. Beyond that, the driver support was horrible and there were bugs galore. Over time it did get better and by the time Windows 7 came out, Vista was decent. Windows 7 was what Vista should have been.
@@JimmyRussle honestly, I tried it for the first time in 2008, and I never experienced any of the problems you described, in fact, I barely experienced any issues with it at all, probably because I got a new computer running it at the time. Also lack of driver support was the fault of device manufacturers, not Microsoft itself. Yet for some reason I don't understand why Vista was still hated even years after the fiasco ended. Sure, basically every Windows release before and after it had problems at first and ended up being loved later on (maybe except Windows Me, but I never tried it so I have no opinion on it), but not Vista, in fact, most of the haters never even tried the damn thing. It brought us features that are standard in modern Windows too. This is why I love Vista so much, in fact, I say it's the absolute best version of Windows ever, yes even better than Windows 7. I got the latter in 2011, and I was pretty disappointed by it, idk it just looked a lot more basic and uninspired. So yeah, get a VM, try out Windows Vista, and see if your opinion changes afterwards.
This was a wonderful memory. My dad and I bonded a lot setting up a custom built machine with Media Center. He worked at Dell and had access to MSDN, so he could get the ISOs. We ran the 2005 version and had both analog and when it became standard, DTV tuner cards. We also ripped music and used it exactly as intended for many many years
I remember building XP-MCE machines from scratch in 2003 to 2006 as an option customers could choose when buying computers. The trick was to find a tuner card, that was compatible. And you needed nvidia pure motion software as well as a bunch of codecs. Other than that, machines were just based on standard PC hardware. Like Asus P5G motherboards, and Radeon gfx.
@@matthewjbauer1990 Yup. But to have access to all functions like live tv and so on, one needed that hauppage or what it was called, that had two tuners. I dont remember much, because someone else did the hardware purchases. I just build the machines from scratch, installed the software. And made sure it was shipped to the customer, or called them on phone to say it was ready for pickup.
MCE required a tuner card with onboard MPEG hardware compression. The All-in-Wonder cards lacked this despite being a seemingly perfect choice for a media center PC. So you were usually stuck with the Hauppage WinDVR style cards.
@@NJRoadfan Or BlackMagic cards. I had six digital (UK freeview) tuners (2 per card) which required a registry hack to enable them all in MC. An nvidia card and nvdvd codec + klite sorted all the codecs, was fantastic for games too. As a bonus you got Windows XP Professional features included as part of MCE instead of just home too. Hahahahaha I still chuckle knowing they had to include all the Windows Professional features because they were needed by MCE due to an oversight when designing the OS :D
Oh, I remember these. The Media Center PCs never really clicked with the people in Czech republic, where I live and because of that, there was a lot of unsold stock in electronics shops soon after their launch. It got so bad, they started running sales on these computers and just for the price of the hardware alone, it was a steal for anyone capable of running normal Windows on these computers. Because some of them were meant as the "family computers", the higher tiers even had quite capable GPUs for some gaming. I wanted to grab one back then, but didn't have the money. But my friend did and if I remember correctly, he used it for at least 5 years and had only the best things to say about that beast for that price.
To be honest I completely missed those things. Windows XP Home it was and then Windows 7. It looks cool and I get the idea but, if you already have a PC. You have a media center right there.
I was big into the HTPC craze in the late 00s and honestly i'm still into them now even though I have no real use for one, love seeing these funky machines and all the cool addons that used to be out there. I was never much of a gamer so I can't commentate on the video card driver situation, but I can tell you that it was possible to obtain MCE legitimately from computer parts distributors as a white box OEM copy. MediaCenter's UX is second to none even today, it was better at watching TV than my actual TV, had An Add-In For That and could be hacked to high hell. It's loss is lamented by the few that still care.
Another big factor of MCE was CableCard support. That is why there were special drivers for the video cards, and the BIOS of the computers had special things in them as well so that encrypted Cable TV could be properly decrypted and protected while being displayed and recorded. That particular unit does not have the PCI CableCard card, but it was an option on most if not all of the models out there.
I used Vista + 7s Media Center a LOT back in the day - I built a dedicated media centre PC for exactly this purpose. It was pretty fun optimising hardware selection to make something slim and silent.
Your Windows XP vids are top notch, I thoroughly enjoy your appreciation for this era. Currently on the hunt for an XP Media Center! Please continue more of these XP era vids! Especially to go as far as having a period correct desk even! Kudos and props!
By memory mediacenter ran Iris an internal replacement for GDI, kind of like skia (google purchased this compositor) and core graphics for Mac, but I don't think many outside of Microsoft knew about it. It is such a pity it didn't end up in the original Windows Mobile proper (I think Zune ran it though), it was one of the reasons (IMHO) iPhone nailed the UI for mobile devices. Great video mate, such high quality content 😀👍
IIRC, you could also use mediacenter's tv stream via XBMC, I remember doing this and casting a dual tuner to a couple of original chipped xboxes running XBMC in the house, it did work reasonably well (channel changes, etc).
@@landspide Yep I used this up until recently with ServerWMC. It worked perfectly, it could even wake up the WMC machine automatically and it would go back to sleep on it's own. Nowadays the TV stations tend to have web streams, you can just point Kodi to a url that contains the stream playlist and program guide for your area and it works off that. Only downside is you miss out on content the station has broadcast rights but not streaming rights to, usually sports stuff.
Had Gateway Media Center for my main TV for several years. Was kinda crusty, but with the right tuner card and network connection to my DVD server, was ahead of its time in some ways. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I built my own with a Vista computer with Media Center and it worked great. I think they fixed some of the issues from the XP version, and if not it was pretty easy to get most stuff working since it was basically a regular PC. It would still lag pretty bad though with a huge music collection, but I always loved the interface.
I remember being able to run the Media Center software on regular XP, and it worked fine whiteout driver issues. I used it for a while then switched to MythTV on Linux which was much better and without copy restrictions... I remember I had the same Hauppauge card as the PC in the video. Now I 'm using an external USB TV tuner with tvheadend and stream from that to all my PCs with Kodi
Yeah I also seem to remember using Media Center as a standalone software option with XP Home Version, but now I’m not sure if I’m misremembering using the Vista version instead.
@@olive8604 it was XP because I never used Vista, you could download the Meda Center software package from Microsoft homepage and it worked on both XP SP3 and Vista
This takes me back! I built my own media center PC back in the day, just in a normal (very cheap) case and a very mediocre AMD Sempron, even manged to get the OEM remote from a retailer in the UK called Novatech (still going today) Media Center itself I "acquired" elsewhere 😄 Was great for playing back downloaded content and I seem to remember even having MAME running on it. It wasn't a patch on this beast though!
I have a Gateway GX7022E with XP-MCE. It's still going strong. On its fifth power supply, and I had to replace the optical drives, but other than that no problems. I used to record a lot of TV shows using the Media Center software. The machine is now relegated to being a file server and always-on email and its great for that use.
I was big into piracy back then, and I tweaked the hell out of this to look sleek on a TV, friends and family were blown away wondering what kind of high tech magic I was using to play music, movies, etc on the big screen. It was great for entertaining everyone. And I've been building HTPCs ever since, but moved on to Kodi.
Media Center looks so sexy, even today. It may even blend into the new material design craze quite well! Such a cool look back at a time that I didn't get to experience, being a media buff back then would have been so exciting!
My first PC that was my own was a Sony VAIO with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and an nVidia GeForce 6150LE. It came with WinXP Media Center on it. At the time I was just getting into computers and learning operating systems and such so I ended up with Win98, WinXP Pro, multiple Linux distros, and eventually Windows 7 on it. Always wondered why WinXP Media Center was so hard to get reinstalled and now I know why. I tried using the media center stuff, but I was more interested in games at the time so never got into it. After watching this video, I realize that system was probably the best thing in our household. Thanks for the great content! Keep it up!
I run a MythTV setup back in that timeframe... Two dual-tuner Hauppauge cards for a total of four tuners... Plus I could auto-rip DVDs and CDs upon insertion... And I could tuck my noisy server away in a different room and just run super-quiet frontend machines at my TVs. I think my favorite feature was when I added Bluetooth dongles to my frontend machines. As long as I took my phone with me, I could move to a different TV in my house and playback would stop on the original TV and pick back up at the new one, without any interaction from me. It's funny that I was living more in the future 20-ish years ago than I am now. lol
For some weird reason, OEMs started loading XP MCE 2005 on all their machines from 2005 to Vista's release. I have several Dell Inspiron laptops with it and a Dimension E520 that came with it. None of the computers came with a tuner card and I don't recall needing special video drivers on them. I think companies did this because MCE 2005 used XP Pro as a base but the license was the same price as Home. Also, none of them seemed to have Royale set as the default theme on the factory image. One big no-no I discovered is that you can't slipstream XP SP3 onto a MCE2005 install disc. It completely breaks the installer which appears to be clobbered together using batch files to setup all the extra software packages. You can slipstream new storage drivers though as all these late-era XP machines usually have AHCI and/or RAID mode enabled for their SATA controllers by default.
I worked at a Gateway store when this was announced. The store had a living room setup with this computer being the center of it all. The display was also a Gateway plasma TV. I worked at the Gateway store the entire time this machine was on the shelf (until the Gateway store was closed) and the only time I remember someone purchasing one was the actual floor model during the going out of business sale. In other words no one bought it, at the time it was just too expensive to justify. Ha! But super cool. It was almost a ‘look at all the cool things you can do with a Gateway PC’ display that customers would oohh and ahhh at, then they would purchase a $400 PC that basically did the same thing. Fun times fun times.
I remember messing around with the Windows 7 version of Media Center and finding it really fascinating. I couldn't do much with it since I didn't (and still don't) watch live TV enough to care about getting a tuner card, my hard drive space for digital copies of movies and TV shows (legal or "otherwise"...) was limited and I had already moved on to Blu-Rays as my medium of choice for disc-based movies, which WMC unfortunately never supported. But the idea of a simple "living room" style interface that made it more seamless to watch videos on my TV from my couch really stuck with me. Fast forward a few years and now I've now got enough hard drive space to store a massive movie and TV show library (mostly ripped from my own Blu-Ray and DVD collection with only a few obtained "elsewhere") that I now mainly watch from my PC, plugged into my TV, via what I now consider to be WMC's spiritual successor in many ways, Kodi. Funny how that works out. XD
My grandfather had an HP Pavilion with Windows XP MCE back in 2005. It ran well enough as a desktop computer and I played a fair few games on it without any issues. But mostly what I used it for was audio file conversions. MCE was unique in that it had a stock audio converter built-in. And I used it all the time to compress MP3s down to 128kbps so I could fit tons and tons of them on my old 1GB Samsung YP-T8Z player. The mid-2000s was a wonderful time to be a teenager.
My mother still uses Windows 7 and Media Center to watch TV on the HTPC I built for her. Only headache (I've had to deal with) over the years was when her rental place switched from DVB-T to DVB-C. Ended up solving that problem with HDHomerun tuner instead of the Terratec H7. Works like a charm to this day.
@@Wasmachineman If all she's using it for is to watch TV, who cares? Even if it gets crypto'd, just reload it. Most I would do is stick it in another subnet so it can't see the rest of the network.
I had the Gateway Destination xtv350 as a teenager. 36 inch tube, Boston acoustics 5.1 surround it ran windows 98. All the media programs to run the hardware were separate from the os. It two was not upgrade able. It went through several different lives until being dismantled. My one buddy had the 36 inch monitor until he got sick of moving it. That thing was $4000 bucks in 98
I was another that built my own XP media center PC from an OEM package that came as a bundle of an ASUS motherboard and the XP MCE DVD. I loved it, and I actually got a lot of use out of the photo module, as it's great for art sets and couch photo viewing. I didn't game on PC much until Windows 7, so I don't remember any of the compatibility problems, and it wasn't expensive since I just bought the promo bundle and built everything else around it. The Microsoft remote and wireless media keyboard were super fly, though. The Gateway's VFD is nice, but the MS keyboard had a really neat design that put the Gateway bundled one to shame. It unfortunately just stopped working after a few years. Every RF wireless keyboard I've had just randomly stopped working after 3-5 years, with no visible reason even after taking it apart.
Oh Media Center. I was a part of the community back then, I miss it. It was the best DVR ever, nothing matched it. At it's peak with Media Center in Windows 7, you could tie in Steam's Big Picture Mode to make an all in one box that did everything. I'd love for you to cover the last versions of Media Center!
My first PC came with media centre edition. I loved it. We didn't have much money so I saved and bought a USB tv tuner to watch live tv. It was great. It eventually got me into xbmc then Kodi. Good times
You took me back with this one. I had one of the HP Media Center computers and used it for a few years till the PSU died. After that inbuilt an XBMC computer running on a PowerPC G5 Mac.
I had a Toshiba laptop with this. I went out to buy a TV tuner card, but was highly annoyed when I found out that it couldn't be used with the Media Center!
So cool to see these units were a thing. I'm an XP fan and have used one of my old SFFs as a media device on a few occasions around the home. The UI design makes me think that it might've inspired the Kodi player and Xbox later on..
Truly an incredible machine. I have an MSI Media Center that I paid around $40 for. I upgraded it with a new processor, maximum RAM, and two hard drives. It also has a VFD display, composite and S-video outputs, and a Hauppauge card. I'm using it to convert my old VHS tapes. I found very little information about it on the internet; I believe they were somewhat obscure machines with few units produced. Great video as always.
Windows XP MCE made so much sense for me as I was a Uni student in 2006 so it was good to have the one device (my PC) to take with me that I could do my work on, but also relax with. As it was Media Center Edition 2005 it worked very well, on both my 2006 and 2007 custom-built PCs and with MCE being a superset of Windows XP Professional I had access to NTLM controls which I needed for making my University email and Wi-Fi work. Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 will always be special to me!
It's so cool, the old "media era" nostalgia.. and also I wonder how the media center invoking button works. I wonder what was between IR receiver and Windows there.
I built a media center computer that I used for recording TV shows. I was able to buy a copy of the windows media center OS, bought a tuner card that came with a media center remote and even purchased the wireless media center keyboard that had the small trackball in it. I used that system for about 5 or 6 years.
Great job with this video! I had an internal cablecard tv tuner in the late 2000s with a home build PC (I obtained MCE “creatively”). It worked wonderfully for several years. The TV interface is still the best I have ever used. I think my tuner card had 4 tuners so I could record a bunch of tv shows at the same time. It was very simple to navigate using a media keyboard with a build in track pad. I had a more modern media PC running channels DVR software but at this point, it is easier just to watch and record TV using a streaming service.
Very cool video, the Gateway FMC-901X looks like a standard DVD player but it's actually a all in one media center. I never used this personally but it seemed like a good option back in the day.
this was just before XBMC, there is files to change the cd scapper and dvdfab was used to remove copy protection from DVDs, a plug in to rip the disks without compression. The software was very configurable also pinnacle made a show center that supported MCXP
It's so cramped inside you really can't see anything. It's all completely custom with brackets and ducting all over. It would require a full disassembly on camera to make sense of it but I didn't want to spend that much time on it in the video.
I used Media Center on my main TV for years. All the way till windows 8. It. was. amazing. and near perfect IMO. You could rip DVDs to the hard drive and add them to the movie library. It also interfaced with my cable box and pulled HD video straight through the firewire port. a newer extender came out later that let you play everything. It was also integrated into the Xbox 360. You can even use the media center remote on the 360
I had a PC with XP Media Center Edition years ago. My Aunt and Uncle bought it to use as an office PC. Thinking back, I have no idea why they did that, but it was fun playing around with it while I had it. I still have the remote and receiver.
This is my favorite version of windows XP, I managed to get this installed on my DIY XP build, and I've been setting it up for multimedia, works pretty good for it's age surprisingly well.
Watching this channel makes me REALLY FEEL MY AGE. I remember when this was top of the line, you were the king/queen of the hill if you had something like this. Now it's a really slow paperweight. Technology advances amaze me.
This was such a nostalgia blast when you started talking about ripping media. I've spent so much time correcting tags and setting the right names for files. It was so fiddly and dumb, why do I miss it?
My wife still misses the TV experience of media center, we ran it from 2005 through 2017, we then moved to TiVO, we are now on apple TV using channels DVR (it close, but that last version of MCE experience was superb).
First computer my parents ever bought brand new was an HP Pavilion A1350n running XP MCE 2005. It was awesome at the time. So many hours playing oblivion on it with an upgraded video card.
Nice to see a good video about this. I still have a hp media center m470n with nearly identical specs to the machine in this vid. I still fire it up every now and then for a fix of nostalgia
I remember this being on display at a Gateway Store in Easton Town Center in Columbus , Ohio. It looked awesome! It was sort of being pushed as a big screen computer that could also be your tv/movie/game center.
I have one of the HP Media Center PC's from 2006. The build quality was excellent. The PC case fits a standard MicroATX motherboard, and is strong and substantial. I keep using the PC case for several of my own PC build's. I can stuff 5, 3.5-in Hard drives and 4, 2.5-in SSD's in the PC case. In the end, the HP Media Center PC became a true media PC with my own modifications. I'm still using it.
When I first looked at Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, I thought there was just Professional and Home Edition until I found out in 2016. This was similar to like what our Sony SAT-T60 DIRECTV TiVo had.
I have been a cord cutter for 10 yrs now & I have a self built PC in my living room. I have pinned the Windows magnifier to the taskbar & use it to read the screen from my easy chair, while running the PC with a cordless mouse. This scenario is so perfect that I see no reason to ever do it any other way.
I had an XP MCE machine I built with a TV tuner in the early 2000s. I remember recording episodes of Family Guy to watch after class. This brought back some good memories.
I’m so glad I got ahold of a Dell restoration disk that has media center edition on it. It’s honestly my favorite version of windows XP out of them all as it’s the version I grew up with.
I built one actually back in the day and it was great for gaming and never really gave my dad any issues at all. I think we even had a retail box but it must have been an oem license we bought. He loved that thing, could play games while recording tv.
I rocked a Media Center PC until windows stopped supporting the guide updates and went to PLEX. I loved Windows Media Center I had a full HD 6 tuner Ceton setup with Xbox 360 and Ceton Echos to watch live TV and all my media in other rooms. I always like the Windows Media center interface and the normal looking remote you could use with an IR receiver. It was said to see Microsoft kill it off, but I can understand why. Guest I'm stuck with PLEX now and I can't remember the last time I watched a TV show. Great video and it brought back some old memories.
When MCE worked, it was great. Often it was plagued by random errors and bugs. Having a compatible IR remote was critically important. They were available as OEM bundles for about $30 USD. I loved having a dual Hauppage TV tuner card for MCE and using it as, well, a DVR and media center....
I had a version of Media Center built into my old laptop, it had its own dedicated poweron button, it actually booted off a separate partition on the drive. It was terrible, ran horribly, I used it like once, but seeing that menu brings back memories of me trying to get it working
I worked on a customer's laptop with the Media Center partition a couple of times. Once was to clone his hard drive from the failing one. The 2nd time I cloned it again, the 2nd partition was gone. That's when he told me he had taken it to another computer shop who claimed his install of Windows was "corrupt" and reformatted and removed it and then he couldn't get the Media Center to work anymore. Dumbarse techs.
Anyone who might be a little lost: this wildly predates e.g. Spotify, any streaming music. We basically all used iTunes or Winamp, and would share giant (50GB lol) USB hard drives with our entire music collection on. You'd end up with mountains of duplicates, different quality rips, shit radio records, accidental porn videos, and loads of other crap xD
This takes me back wow. I remember having a HP Media Center PC back then and I would use it to record cable tv over coax lol it lasted for like 10 years until the CPU and motherboard crapped out.
I had the Vista MC and used it all the time. Then when Win 8 came out I paid for the MC as well. It worked pretty well. I recorded over the air and fast forwarded thru the commercials. I still have the remote(s) and receivers. It works to put the PC to sleep fast.
I remember using xp sp3 on my Pentium 4 tower pc and i installed media centre on that.. was way more compatible with gaming and was just a normal pc when i needed it to be or ya can run media centre ya could even have media centre start with the pc at start up.. after watching this i realised that the way my setup was is the best way and gave me the best of both worlds.
Hang on... Cake albums! I've literally spent decades thinking that I was the only person I was aware of who enjoyed listening to them. Thanks so much for showing that alone!
I've enjoyed MCE when I got it with my first laptop, a DELL, back in 2006. DVR and timeshifting was awesome for a college guy back in the day. After that I moved on for many years using MediaPortal. It was such a nice ride.
I bought XP media center retail and remotes to build multiple machines for me and my friends, was a huge fan, you didn't need to buy a retail machine. There was no driver issue, but there was a standard remote-control design and only certain tuners or MPEG encoders worked. I am such a big fan that I wish there was still a media center addon for Windows.
I still have my old laptop I bought back in 2005 that is a Media Centre. I used to use it to watch TV wirelessly and in my parents car. It worked really well.
I should blow the dust off me custom built WinXP-MCE 2005 box I built not long ago. I built it for offline storage and playback of videos, music, dvds, and radio with two of these same PCI tuner/capture cards your system uses but I have not been able to find the drivers needed to make them work with my systems until now so thanks for pointing me that way! As well as the codec pack you shown is something I need to add to it immediately! I changed the theme to Royal Noir as it better suits my night time watching hours but otherwise its an absolute rock solid unit. Rocking a Core 2 Quad (2.83Ghz), 8gb DDR2 ram, GTX 750ti, two tuners, Audigy2, etc, this thing really has no issues even with the few games I play on it. Hopefully I can get it paired to my Windows Home Server for backups!
I got nostalgic thinking about the awesome AVR style case the 901 sported. Then... as a former Gateway tech support guy... you talking about the video driver and DRM/copy protection issues... a flood of horrific nightmare support calls flooded my mind... and then I remembered.. I hated the 901.... but not quite as much as the 610 Media Center.
Used media center till 2018 with 2 Ceton 4 cards. Having 8 tuners, expandable DVR storage and xbox 360s wherever I had TVs was quite a treat:) Stopped my cable subscription that year and haven't used cable tv since.
I just used my regular pc for this. I just connected my pc to my tv with a secondary output, got an early wireless keyboard with a trackball and used my main stereo setup for sound. Getting an early powered usb extender for my mouse meant that I could play pc games and videos from my couch as early as 2003. Max Payne and Clive Barker's Undying was awesome on 28" with full sound!
I did something similar but connected it to a second hand short throw projector which flooded my room wall with 127” of windows vista, connected to my 5.1 stacker system …this being while I was at uni as well so you can imagine my housemates piling in to my room to watch a film/ play a game…memories
I remember a guy who archived tapes, T.V and other media with his one. Back when you had 20 and 40GB drives as max capacity. He had entire shelves of archived stuff.
WMCE was great! I remember having twin digital TV tuners and recording movies and TV shows when most people back then didn't even have digital TV tuners.
I've never used MCE specific drivers on WinXP MCE and never had any problems... I have a couple machines with it, one HP and one OEM and never had problems with games or the MCE software with generic XP drivers. Only used the 2005 and newer now that I think about it! Great video...
In 2006 I bought an "Acer Aspire iDea 500" with MCE2005: A sleek looking device that "revolutionized" my TV viewing (still on a CRT back then). It wasn't really a desktop PC like this Gateway but basically a laptop without a screen and it was only half as high... It featured an all-in-one mainboard, an early dual core laptop CPU, 1 GB RAM, two mini-PCI tuner cards, HDMI output, AC5.1, gigabit LAN, a nice VFD, a remote and a wireless keyboard with built-in touchpad. The graphics were supplied by the Intel chipset so it was limited: no triple-A 3D games with that one which was fine with me. It was a dedicated movie & TV machine. I had to modify & repair it over the years, though: - The harddisk was initially a 250 GB drive but I replaced it in several steps up to 2 TB. I put it on rubber feet and fastened it with plastic screws. It then was very quiet. - It's miniature built-in 150 W power supply died twice(!) on me but I could revive it by replacing the caps. It was very cramped inside... I used it from 2006 to 2015 to record many movies, documentaries and a few TV series - some of them never re-broadcasted. To convert the videos & cut out the ads I used "VideoReDo" which was extremely comfy and quick as it only recoded when necessary. The one thing really bothering me was that MCE never had a good way to shut down the system (after all recordings were done, perhaps with a grace period). Instead, Microsoft expected the OEMs to configure Windows to enter a power-saving-mode when "nothing happened for x minutes". Very kludgy! Some Dutch(?) fella then programmed an MCE extension to monitor recordings and shut down the system automatically and the problem was mostly solved. This MCE forum ("Green Button"?) closed a long time ago. When it finally broke down I was in the process of moving so I replaced it later with a PC built from standard parts and with Win 7 and its MCE. As I got HD cable TV with my new flat I needed new tuners anyway and the new LG OLED-TV asked me personally to get HD content... The PC got a case from Silverstone similar to this Gateway but without an VFD and I stuffed it with an Asus mainboard, a modern quadcore with built-in graphics and an SSD for the OS. I then upgraded it with a second SSD to better cut movies and then with a quadruple-tuner TV card (with an SSD one could record 4 programs simulaneously, even while doing other stuff). When I upgraded my main PC this media PC got a quiet Geforce 770 so it's smoother and it can now run (older) games in 1080p. The advantages of having a big case... Where I live there are public broadcast channels in HD that show movies without ads in 720p with ridiculously good quality & Dolby digital sound (5 gigs/hour). As I love older movies I'm very happy with that. I cut them with a HD-capable version of VideoReDo and have more network storage than ever (around 40 TB right now). Like many horders I now have thousands of recordings since 2006 and can watch anything I like when I like it. I have no use for streaming services with movies vanishing from them... And, yes, this system still receives the regular EPG data from Microsoft, although only for the next few days (not 7 or 10 days like before). When Microsoft drops this entirely I will switch over to NextPVR, I think.
I ran a hacked version of XP Media Center for a while, eventually moving on to Windows 7 Media Center. It worked well with my Cable Card, and I had a ton of recorded TV shows and Movies. I remember having to purchase a third-party app (cannot remember the name) to download Channel Guides for my area. I ran that box until sometime in 2015, when I finally made the move to Plex and HD HomeRun devices. Now I don't even watch Live TV, either downloaded or streamed content. Not sure I could go back, but it was fun times with WMC!
As a bonus you got Windows XP Professional features included as part of MCE instead of just home too. Hahahahaha I still chuckle knowing they had to include all the Windows Professional features because they were needed by MCE due to an oversight when designing the OS :D
My dad bought one for the family around 2006. He was so excited that it had hddvd. The rest of us knew better. Could never get the component working and the s-video had scaling issues on the projector. It sat in the corner while everyone just used the consoles, set top boxes, dvds, and later rokus. Eventually the keyboard battery corroded, so I parted it out and threw the ugly chassis in a dumpster.
This brought back some horrible memories of dealing with disgusting anti-consumer DVD region locking, Windows Media Center (later versions at least) would allow a limited number of region changes which you could abuse to reset the counter but it was still a pain to constantly have to switch and reset, soon found out that software like VLC just ignored region locking, never looked back.
Nowadays it´s a pain to play blu rays.
DVD and BD formats won´t play in Windows 10 out of the box anymore and BD in particular never did as far as i know.
But we have MakeMKV and it literally copies the disk and puts it in a flexible mkv file which can be played using Media Player or VLC.
So i don´t even try to play them directly.
Another benefit: I put the files on my network storage and access it easily on my Android TV.
Why would you ever need to change the region? I never once had too.
It's not Windows MCE problem. In DVD Drive you have limited count of region switches. It does have interface for that.
This is actually a hardware limitation built into most DVD drives. But there is a tool called MCSE that allows you to patch the firmware to remove that restriction. Sadly the same is not possible for blu-ray...
Yeah, the dark days of early DVD playback on computers really sucked.
2005 edition was a MASSIVE upgrade, it was basically XP Pro with Media Center tacked on, it's the edition I would run back in the day.
Same here. I miss that old machine I used back then. I still have it, but towards the end of its use, it started suffering major slowdowns and the hard drives were making a bunch of sad hard drive noises. They're probably long since dead by now.
That's the edition I used. I had a Haupagge USB tuner connected to it. I also used my Xbox 360 as a client on another tv. It was great and I used it until I bought a Windows 7 pro PC that had media center standard. That one used both the USB tuner and a networked HD Homerun dual tuner. I really liked it better than my TiVo.
@@MrModamanReviews Same here. Still have my old Haupagge card and it works with OTA broadcasts.
Isn't that what everyone else got funneled to? I remember our early HP MCE machine having the "Media Center Edition" branding on the boot animation, but that ultimately got replaced by the "Windows XP" with the blue loading bar, normal SP3 info on winver, etc.
Saaaame here. Too bad that I didn't have the Windows XP Media Center Edition on my computer, but good think that Windows XP (with SP3 of course) was the first operating system that I was using when I was a little kid.
I used Vista's Media Center a ton back in the day and it was definitely my favorite version. With a Hauppauge dual tuner I was loving life. That is until our cable company encrypted all of their channels and the fun came to an abrupt end.
I remember the magic of getting my first hardware MPEG2 encoder Hauppauge card and MS OEM MCE remote. Too bad there's no MCE anymore, but the remote still works perfectly with Win10/11.
Vista was gold.
Yeah, the sudden loss of ClearQAM sucked hard.
@@resolvanlemmy Not many people share that opinion lol. It was TERRIBLE when it was released. The system requirements were too high and builders were bringing out computers that could barely run it. Beyond that, the driver support was horrible and there were bugs galore. Over time it did get better and by the time Windows 7 came out, Vista was decent. Windows 7 was what Vista should have been.
@@JimmyRussle honestly, I tried it for the first time in 2008, and I never experienced any of the problems you described, in fact, I barely experienced any issues with it at all, probably because I got a new computer running it at the time. Also lack of driver support was the fault of device manufacturers, not Microsoft itself.
Yet for some reason I don't understand why Vista was still hated even years after the fiasco ended. Sure, basically every Windows release before and after it had problems at first and ended up being loved later on (maybe except Windows Me, but I never tried it so I have no opinion on it), but not Vista, in fact, most of the haters never even tried the damn thing. It brought us features that are standard in modern Windows too. This is why I love Vista so much, in fact, I say it's the absolute best version of Windows ever, yes even better than Windows 7. I got the latter in 2011, and I was pretty disappointed by it, idk it just looked a lot more basic and uninspired. So yeah, get a VM, try out Windows Vista, and see if your opinion changes afterwards.
This was a wonderful memory. My dad and I bonded a lot setting up a custom built machine with Media Center. He worked at Dell and had access to MSDN, so he could get the ISOs. We ran the 2005 version and had both analog and when it became standard, DTV tuner cards. We also ripped music and used it exactly as intended for many many years
My first so-called "own TV" was actually a TV tuner card in my computer, I used Media Center app with that. It actually worked pretty well.
I remember building XP-MCE machines from scratch in 2003 to 2006 as an option customers could choose when buying computers. The trick was to find a tuner card, that was compatible. And you needed nvidia pure motion software as well as a bunch of codecs. Other than that, machines were just based on standard PC hardware. Like Asus P5G motherboards, and Radeon gfx.
I put an ATI All-in-Wonder in a MCE build back in 2005 or 2006 and it worked just fine. No Nvidia anything and it worked just fine.
@@matthewjbauer1990 Yup. But to have access to all functions like live tv and so on, one needed that hauppage or what it was called, that had two tuners. I dont remember much, because someone else did the hardware purchases. I just build the machines from scratch, installed the software. And made sure it was shipped to the customer, or called them on phone to say it was ready for pickup.
MCE required a tuner card with onboard MPEG hardware compression. The All-in-Wonder cards lacked this despite being a seemingly perfect choice for a media center PC. So you were usually stuck with the Hauppage WinDVR style cards.
@@NJRoadfan Ahhh.... That explains it a lot. Thanks. 🙂
@@NJRoadfan Or BlackMagic cards. I had six digital (UK freeview) tuners (2 per card) which required a registry hack to enable them all in MC. An nvidia card and nvdvd codec + klite sorted all the codecs, was fantastic for games too. As a bonus you got Windows XP Professional features included as part of MCE instead of just home too. Hahahahaha I still chuckle knowing they had to include all the Windows Professional features because they were needed by MCE due to an oversight when designing the OS :D
Oh, I remember these. The Media Center PCs never really clicked with the people in Czech republic, where I live and because of that, there was a lot of unsold stock in electronics shops soon after their launch. It got so bad, they started running sales on these computers and just for the price of the hardware alone, it was a steal for anyone capable of running normal Windows on these computers. Because some of them were meant as the "family computers", the higher tiers even had quite capable GPUs for some gaming. I wanted to grab one back then, but didn't have the money. But my friend did and if I remember correctly, he used it for at least 5 years and had only the best things to say about that beast for that price.
damn buy me one XD
Hey, im from czechia too
To be honest I completely missed those things. Windows XP Home it was and then Windows 7. It looks cool and I get the idea but, if you already have a PC. You have a media center right there.
@@Ikeaboi I wouldn't think I would see Czech folks here KEKW
@@RadOo its for people who want to keep a clean look in there tv set.
I was big into the HTPC craze in the late 00s and honestly i'm still into them now even though I have no real use for one, love seeing these funky machines and all the cool addons that used to be out there. I was never much of a gamer so I can't commentate on the video card driver situation, but I can tell you that it was possible to obtain MCE legitimately from computer parts distributors as a white box OEM copy. MediaCenter's UX is second to none even today, it was better at watching TV than my actual TV, had An Add-In For That and could be hacked to high hell. It's loss is lamented by the few that still care.
Another big factor of MCE was CableCard support. That is why there were special drivers for the video cards, and the BIOS of the computers had special things in them as well so that encrypted Cable TV could be properly decrypted and protected while being displayed and recorded. That particular unit does not have the PCI CableCard card, but it was an option on most if not all of the models out there.
I used Vista + 7s Media Center a LOT back in the day - I built a dedicated media centre PC for exactly this purpose. It was pretty fun optimising hardware selection to make something slim and silent.
Your Windows XP vids are top notch, I thoroughly enjoy your appreciation for this era. Currently on the hunt for an XP Media Center! Please continue more of these XP era vids! Especially to go as far as having a period correct desk even! Kudos and props!
By memory mediacenter ran Iris an internal replacement for GDI, kind of like skia (google purchased this compositor) and core graphics for Mac, but I don't think many outside of Microsoft knew about it. It is such a pity it didn't end up in the original Windows Mobile proper (I think Zune ran it though), it was one of the reasons (IMHO) iPhone nailed the UI for mobile devices. Great video mate, such high quality content 😀👍
IIRC, you could also use mediacenter's tv stream via XBMC, I remember doing this and casting a dual tuner to a couple of original chipped xboxes running XBMC in the house, it did work reasonably well (channel changes, etc).
@@landspide Yep I used this up until recently with ServerWMC. It worked perfectly, it could even wake up the WMC machine automatically and it would go back to sleep on it's own. Nowadays the TV stations tend to have web streams, you can just point Kodi to a url that contains the stream playlist and program guide for your area and it works off that. Only downside is you miss out on content the station has broadcast rights but not streaming rights to, usually sports stuff.
Had Gateway Media Center for my main TV for several years. Was kinda crusty, but with the right tuner card and network connection to my DVD server, was ahead of its time in some ways. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I built my own with a Vista computer with Media Center and it worked great. I think they fixed some of the issues from the XP version, and if not it was pretty easy to get most stuff working since it was basically a regular PC. It would still lag pretty bad though with a huge music collection, but I always loved the interface.
I remember being able to run the Media Center software on regular XP, and it worked fine whiteout driver issues. I used it for a while then switched to MythTV on Linux which was much better and without copy restrictions... I remember I had the same Hauppauge card as the PC in the video. Now I 'm using an external USB TV tuner with tvheadend and stream from that to all my PCs with Kodi
Yeah I also seem to remember using Media Center as a standalone software option with XP Home Version, but now I’m not sure if I’m misremembering using the Vista version instead.
@@olive8604 it was XP because I never used Vista, you could download the Meda Center software package from Microsoft homepage and it worked on both XP SP3 and Vista
This takes me back!
I built my own media center PC back in the day, just in a normal (very cheap) case and a very mediocre AMD Sempron, even manged to get the OEM remote from a retailer in the UK called Novatech (still going today) Media Center itself I "acquired" elsewhere 😄
Was great for playing back downloaded content and I seem to remember even having MAME running on it.
It wasn't a patch on this beast though!
I have a Gateway GX7022E with XP-MCE. It's still going strong. On its fifth power supply, and I had to replace the optical drives, but other than that no problems.
I used to record a lot of TV shows using the Media Center software. The machine is now relegated to being a file server and always-on email and its great for that use.
I was big into piracy back then, and I tweaked the hell out of this to look sleek on a TV, friends and family were blown away wondering what kind of high tech magic I was using to play music, movies, etc on the big screen. It was great for entertaining everyone. And I've been building HTPCs ever since, but moved on to Kodi.
media player looks surprisingly modern!
Media Center looks so sexy, even today. It may even blend into the new material design craze quite well!
Such a cool look back at a time that I didn't get to experience, being a media buff back then would have been so exciting!
It aged really well
My first PC that was my own was a Sony VAIO with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and an nVidia GeForce 6150LE. It came with WinXP Media Center on it. At the time I was just getting into computers and learning operating systems and such so I ended up with Win98, WinXP Pro, multiple Linux distros, and eventually Windows 7 on it. Always wondered why WinXP Media Center was so hard to get reinstalled and now I know why.
I tried using the media center stuff, but I was more interested in games at the time so never got into it. After watching this video, I realize that system was probably the best thing in our household.
Thanks for the great content! Keep it up!
I run a MythTV setup back in that timeframe... Two dual-tuner Hauppauge cards for a total of four tuners... Plus I could auto-rip DVDs and CDs upon insertion... And I could tuck my noisy server away in a different room and just run super-quiet frontend machines at my TVs. I think my favorite feature was when I added Bluetooth dongles to my frontend machines. As long as I took my phone with me, I could move to a different TV in my house and playback would stop on the original TV and pick back up at the new one, without any interaction from me. It's funny that I was living more in the future 20-ish years ago than I am now. lol
For some weird reason, OEMs started loading XP MCE 2005 on all their machines from 2005 to Vista's release. I have several Dell Inspiron laptops with it and a Dimension E520 that came with it. None of the computers came with a tuner card and I don't recall needing special video drivers on them. I think companies did this because MCE 2005 used XP Pro as a base but the license was the same price as Home. Also, none of them seemed to have Royale set as the default theme on the factory image.
One big no-no I discovered is that you can't slipstream XP SP3 onto a MCE2005 install disc. It completely breaks the installer which appears to be clobbered together using batch files to setup all the extra software packages. You can slipstream new storage drivers though as all these late-era XP machines usually have AHCI and/or RAID mode enabled for their SATA controllers by default.
I love channels like this! What a fantastic job. Thanks for making this.
This is a good example why I avoided OEM crap all my life.
I worked at a Gateway store when this was announced. The store had a living room setup with this computer being the center of it all. The display was also a Gateway plasma TV. I worked at the Gateway store the entire time this machine was on the shelf (until the Gateway store was closed) and the only time I remember someone purchasing one was the actual floor model during the going out of business sale. In other words no one bought it, at the time it was just too expensive to justify. Ha! But super cool. It was almost a ‘look at all the cool things you can do with a Gateway PC’ display that customers would oohh and ahhh at, then they would purchase a $400 PC that basically did the same thing. Fun times fun times.
My period correct way of getting Microsoft software was the big juicy MSDN binder we had at work. Of course, it was for testing... yeah... testing.
Getting one of those binders was like a golden ticket!
I remember messing around with the Windows 7 version of Media Center and finding it really fascinating. I couldn't do much with it since I didn't (and still don't) watch live TV enough to care about getting a tuner card, my hard drive space for digital copies of movies and TV shows (legal or "otherwise"...) was limited and I had already moved on to Blu-Rays as my medium of choice for disc-based movies, which WMC unfortunately never supported. But the idea of a simple "living room" style interface that made it more seamless to watch videos on my TV from my couch really stuck with me.
Fast forward a few years and now I've now got enough hard drive space to store a massive movie and TV show library (mostly ripped from my own Blu-Ray and DVD collection with only a few obtained "elsewhere") that I now mainly watch from my PC, plugged into my TV, via what I now consider to be WMC's spiritual successor in many ways, Kodi. Funny how that works out. XD
My grandfather had an HP Pavilion with Windows XP MCE back in 2005. It ran well enough as a desktop computer and I played a fair few games on it without any issues. But mostly what I used it for was audio file conversions. MCE was unique in that it had a stock audio converter built-in. And I used it all the time to compress MP3s down to 128kbps so I could fit tons and tons of them on my old 1GB Samsung YP-T8Z player. The mid-2000s was a wonderful time to be a teenager.
My mother still uses Windows 7 and Media Center to watch TV on the HTPC I built for her. Only headache (I've had to deal with) over the years was when her rental place switched from DVB-T to DVB-C. Ended up solving that problem with HDHomerun tuner instead of the Terratec H7. Works like a charm to this day.
Please do tell me you're keeping it updated by means of something like the SimpliX Pack.
@@Wasmachineman If all she's using it for is to watch TV, who cares? Even if it gets crypto'd, just reload it. Most I would do is stick it in another subnet so it can't see the rest of the network.
I had the Gateway Destination xtv350 as a teenager. 36 inch tube, Boston acoustics 5.1 surround it ran windows 98. All the media programs to run the hardware were separate from the os. It two was not upgrade able. It went through several different lives until being dismantled. My one buddy had the 36 inch monitor until he got sick of moving it. That thing was $4000 bucks in 98
I was another that built my own XP media center PC from an OEM package that came as a bundle of an ASUS motherboard and the XP MCE DVD. I loved it, and I actually got a lot of use out of the photo module, as it's great for art sets and couch photo viewing. I didn't game on PC much until Windows 7, so I don't remember any of the compatibility problems, and it wasn't expensive since I just bought the promo bundle and built everything else around it.
The Microsoft remote and wireless media keyboard were super fly, though. The Gateway's VFD is nice, but the MS keyboard had a really neat design that put the Gateway bundled one to shame. It unfortunately just stopped working after a few years. Every RF wireless keyboard I've had just randomly stopped working after 3-5 years, with no visible reason even after taking it apart.
I loved Media Center growing up, I remember Mostly Vista's and Xbox 360 had it built in as well to connect my PC files.
Oh Media Center. I was a part of the community back then, I miss it. It was the best DVR ever, nothing matched it. At it's peak with Media Center in Windows 7, you could tie in Steam's Big Picture Mode to make an all in one box that did everything.
I'd love for you to cover the last versions of Media Center!
My first PC came with media centre edition. I loved it. We didn't have much money so I saved and bought a USB tv tuner to watch live tv. It was great. It eventually got me into xbmc then Kodi. Good times
You took me back with this one. I had one of the HP Media Center computers and used it for a few years till the PSU died. After that inbuilt an XBMC computer running on a PowerPC G5 Mac.
I made use of Media centre on Win7, it was our only TV for several years.
I had a Toshiba laptop with this. I went out to buy a TV tuner card, but was highly annoyed when I found out that it couldn't be used with the Media Center!
So cool to see these units were a thing. I'm an XP fan and have used one of my old SFFs as a media device on a few occasions around the home.
The UI design makes me think that it might've inspired the Kodi player and Xbox later on..
I almost cross my eyes from reading so much the words go by so fast my eyes hurt, great video!
I worked for OEM at this time and think my own personal MCE XP PC might only one we built but was beast and love it
Truly an incredible machine.
I have an MSI Media Center that I paid around $40 for. I upgraded it with a new processor, maximum RAM, and two hard drives. It also has a VFD display, composite and S-video outputs, and a Hauppauge card. I'm using it to convert my old VHS tapes. I found very little information about it on the internet; I believe they were somewhat obscure machines with few units produced.
Great video as always.
Windows XP MCE made so much sense for me as I was a Uni student in 2006 so it was good to have the one device (my PC) to take with me that I could do my work on, but also relax with. As it was Media Center Edition 2005 it worked very well, on both my 2006 and 2007 custom-built PCs and with MCE being a superset of Windows XP Professional I had access to NTLM controls which I needed for making my University email and Wi-Fi work. Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 will always be special to me!
It's so cool, the old "media era" nostalgia.. and also I wonder how the media center invoking button works. I wonder what was between IR receiver and Windows there.
I built a media center computer that I used for recording TV shows. I was able to buy a copy of the windows media center OS, bought a tuner card that came with a media center remote and even purchased the wireless media center keyboard that had the small trackball in it. I used that system for about 5 or 6 years.
Great job with this video! I had an internal cablecard tv tuner in the late 2000s with a home build PC (I obtained MCE “creatively”). It worked wonderfully for several years. The TV interface is still the best I have ever used. I think my tuner card had 4 tuners so I could record a bunch of tv shows at the same time. It was very simple to navigate using a media keyboard with a build in track pad. I had a more modern media PC running channels DVR software but at this point, it is easier just to watch and record TV using a streaming service.
Very cool video, the Gateway FMC-901X looks like a standard DVD player but it's actually a all in one media center. I never used this personally but it seemed like a good option back in the day.
this was just before XBMC, there is files to change the cd scapper and dvdfab was used to remove copy protection from DVDs, a plug in to rip the disks without compression. The software was very configurable also pinnacle made a show center that supported MCXP
Would've been cool if you also showed the insides of this beast 😉
It's so cramped inside you really can't see anything. It's all completely custom with brackets and ducting all over. It would require a full disassembly on camera to make sense of it but I didn't want to spend that much time on it in the video.
I never used Windows Media Center, so this video was fascinating! Great job!
Thanks for the nostalgia, I remember being hyped getting my hands on a copy
I used Media Center on my main TV for years. All the way till windows 8. It. was. amazing. and near perfect IMO. You could rip DVDs to the hard drive and add them to the movie library. It also interfaced with my cable box and pulled HD video straight through the firewire port. a newer extender came out later that let you play everything. It was also integrated into the Xbox 360. You can even use the media center remote on the 360
I had a PC with XP Media Center Edition years ago. My Aunt and Uncle bought it to use as an office PC. Thinking back, I have no idea why they did that, but it was fun playing around with it while I had it. I still have the remote and receiver.
Media Center in Vista and Win7 was absolutely the best TV tuner software available. I used it for years
This is my favorite version of windows XP, I managed to get this installed on my DIY XP build, and I've been setting it up for multimedia, works pretty good for it's age surprisingly well.
Watching this channel makes me REALLY FEEL MY AGE. I remember when this was top of the line, you were the king/queen of the hill if you had something like this. Now it's a really slow paperweight. Technology advances amaze me.
This was such a nostalgia blast when you started talking about ripping media.
I've spent so much time correcting tags and setting the right names for files.
It was so fiddly and dumb, why do I miss it?
My wife still misses the TV experience of media center, we ran it from 2005 through 2017, we then moved to TiVO, we are now on apple TV using channels DVR (it close, but that last version of MCE experience was superb).
First computer my parents ever bought brand new was an HP Pavilion A1350n running XP MCE 2005. It was awesome at the time. So many hours playing oblivion on it with an upgraded video card.
Nice to see a good video about this. I still have a hp media center m470n with nearly identical specs to the machine in this vid. I still fire it up every now and then for a fix of nostalgia
9:30 PVR recorders are still available on the market, and they still work the same way as back in the day. I still use one as main timeshifting device
I remember this being on display at a Gateway Store in Easton Town Center in Columbus , Ohio. It looked awesome! It was sort of being pushed as a big screen computer that could also be your tv/movie/game center.
I have one of the HP Media Center PC's from 2006. The build quality was excellent. The PC case fits a standard MicroATX motherboard, and is strong and substantial. I keep using the PC case for several of my own PC build's. I can stuff 5, 3.5-in Hard drives and 4, 2.5-in SSD's in the PC case. In the end, the HP Media Center PC became a true media PC with my own modifications. I'm still using it.
When I first looked at Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, I thought there was just Professional and Home Edition until I found out in 2016. This was similar to like what our Sony SAT-T60 DIRECTV TiVo had.
I have been a cord cutter for 10 yrs now & I have a self built PC in my living room. I have pinned the Windows magnifier to the taskbar & use it to read the screen from my easy chair, while running the PC with a cordless mouse. This scenario is so perfect that I see no reason to ever do it any other way.
I had an XP MCE machine I built with a TV tuner in the early 2000s. I remember recording episodes of Family Guy to watch after class. This brought back some good memories.
I’m so glad I got ahold of a Dell restoration disk that has media center edition on it. It’s honestly my favorite version of windows XP out of them all as it’s the version I grew up with.
I built one actually back in the day and it was great for gaming and never really gave my dad any issues at all. I think we even had a retail box but it must have been an oem license we bought. He loved that thing, could play games while recording tv.
Fantastic video! I installed media center edition, just to stream videos to my Xbox 360. The good old days!
XP Media Center Edition was my first and only personal foray into WinXP with the Dell laptop I bought in 2005
Win2k forever 😢
I rocked a Media Center PC until windows stopped supporting the guide updates and went to PLEX. I loved Windows Media Center I had a full HD 6 tuner Ceton setup with Xbox 360 and Ceton Echos to watch live TV and all my media in other rooms. I always like the Windows Media center interface and the normal looking remote you could use with an IR receiver. It was said to see Microsoft kill it off, but I can understand why. Guest I'm stuck with PLEX now and I can't remember the last time I watched a TV show. Great video and it brought back some old memories.
When MCE worked, it was great. Often it was plagued by random errors and bugs. Having a compatible IR remote was critically important. They were available as OEM bundles for about $30 USD. I loved having a dual Hauppage TV tuner card for MCE and using it as, well, a DVR and media center....
I had a version of Media Center built into my old laptop, it had its own dedicated poweron button, it actually booted off a separate partition on the drive. It was terrible, ran horribly, I used it like once, but seeing that menu brings back memories of me trying to get it working
I worked on a customer's laptop with the Media Center partition a couple of times. Once was to clone his hard drive from the failing one. The 2nd time I cloned it again, the 2nd partition was gone. That's when he told me he had taken it to another computer shop who claimed his install of Windows was "corrupt" and reformatted and removed it and then he couldn't get the Media Center to work anymore. Dumbarse techs.
Anyone who might be a little lost: this wildly predates e.g. Spotify, any streaming music.
We basically all used iTunes or Winamp, and would share giant (50GB lol) USB hard drives with our entire music collection on.
You'd end up with mountains of duplicates, different quality rips, shit radio records, accidental porn videos, and loads of other crap xD
best thing about XPMC was Royale Noir, a special dark theme.
I use to use media center via windows 7 (I think) and the TV interface was just fantastic. Kept it around until I ditched cable.
This takes me back wow. I remember having a HP Media Center PC back then and I would use it to record cable tv over coax lol it lasted for like 10 years until the CPU and motherboard crapped out.
I had the Vista MC and used it all the time. Then when Win 8 came out I paid for the MC as well. It worked pretty well. I recorded over the air and fast forwarded thru the commercials. I still have the remote(s) and receivers. It works to put the PC to sleep fast.
I remember using xp sp3 on my Pentium 4 tower pc and i installed media centre on that.. was way more compatible with gaming and was just a normal pc when i needed it to be or ya can run media centre ya could even have media centre start with the pc at start up.. after watching this i realised that the way my setup was is the best way and gave me the best of both worlds.
Hang on... Cake albums! I've literally spent decades thinking that I was the only person I was aware of who enjoyed listening to them. Thanks so much for showing that alone!
I've enjoyed MCE when I got it with my first laptop, a DELL, back in 2006. DVR and timeshifting was awesome for a college guy back in the day. After that I moved on for many years using MediaPortal. It was such a nice ride.
I bought XP media center retail and remotes to build multiple machines for me and my friends, was a huge fan, you didn't need to buy a retail machine. There was no driver issue, but there was a standard remote-control design and only certain tuners or MPEG encoders worked.
I am such a big fan that I wish there was still a media center addon for Windows.
This thing is mind bogglingly fluid and lag-free. How is it so much better than any modern cable box and most android tv boxes and smart TVs
I still have my old laptop I bought back in 2005 that is a Media Centre. I used to use it to watch TV wirelessly and in my parents car. It worked really well.
I should blow the dust off me custom built WinXP-MCE 2005 box I built not long ago. I built it for offline storage and playback of videos, music, dvds, and radio with two of these same PCI tuner/capture cards your system uses but I have not been able to find the drivers needed to make them work with my systems until now so thanks for pointing me that way! As well as the codec pack you shown is something I need to add to it immediately!
I changed the theme to Royal Noir as it better suits my night time watching hours but otherwise its an absolute rock solid unit. Rocking a Core 2 Quad (2.83Ghz), 8gb DDR2 ram, GTX 750ti, two tuners, Audigy2, etc, this thing really has no issues even with the few games I play on it. Hopefully I can get it paired to my Windows Home Server for backups!
Running an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ with this was a chore. I am old. Good to see the Gateway Holy Grail Gateway in use !
I got nostalgic thinking about the awesome AVR style case the 901 sported. Then... as a former Gateway tech support guy... you talking about the video driver and DRM/copy protection issues... a flood of horrific nightmare support calls flooded my mind... and then I remembered.. I hated the 901.... but not quite as much as the 610 Media Center.
I always had a special place in my heart for windows media center cus I actually loved the idea and design of it.
i always though windows media center was capable something,but i never though it was a whole distribution nice video man subscribed
Used media center till 2018 with 2 Ceton 4 cards. Having 8 tuners, expandable DVR storage and xbox 360s wherever I had TVs was quite a treat:) Stopped my cable subscription that year and haven't used cable tv since.
I just used my regular pc for this. I just connected my pc to my tv with a secondary output, got an early wireless keyboard with a trackball and used my main stereo setup for sound. Getting an early powered usb extender for my mouse meant that I could play pc games and videos from my couch as early as 2003. Max Payne and Clive Barker's Undying was awesome on 28" with full sound!
I did something similar but connected it to a second hand short throw projector which flooded my room wall with 127” of windows vista, connected to my 5.1 stacker system …this being while I was at uni as well so you can imagine my housemates piling in to my room to watch a film/ play a game…memories
I remember a guy who archived tapes, T.V and other media with his one. Back when you had 20 and 40GB drives as max capacity. He had entire shelves of archived stuff.
WMCE was great! I remember having twin digital TV tuners and recording movies and TV shows when most people back then didn't even have digital TV tuners.
Titan AE was so great. Cosmic castaway and Over my Head have stuck with me since childhood.
I've never used MCE specific drivers on WinXP MCE and never had any problems... I have a couple machines with it, one HP and one OEM and never had problems with games or the MCE software with generic XP drivers. Only used the 2005 and newer now that I think about it! Great video...
2:40 Had this type of computer growing up. Very high end for something made in the 2000s, worked well into the early 2010s.
In 2006 I bought an "Acer Aspire iDea 500" with MCE2005: A sleek looking device that "revolutionized" my TV viewing (still on a CRT back then).
It wasn't really a desktop PC like this Gateway but basically a laptop without a screen and it was only half as high...
It featured an all-in-one mainboard, an early dual core laptop CPU, 1 GB RAM, two mini-PCI tuner cards, HDMI output, AC5.1, gigabit LAN, a nice VFD, a remote and a wireless keyboard with built-in touchpad. The graphics were supplied by the Intel chipset so it was limited: no triple-A 3D games with that one which was fine with me. It was a dedicated movie & TV machine.
I had to modify & repair it over the years, though:
- The harddisk was initially a 250 GB drive but I replaced it in several steps up to 2 TB. I put it on rubber feet and fastened it with plastic screws. It then was very quiet.
- It's miniature built-in 150 W power supply died twice(!) on me but I could revive it by replacing the caps. It was very cramped inside...
I used it from 2006 to 2015 to record many movies, documentaries and a few TV series - some of them never re-broadcasted.
To convert the videos & cut out the ads I used "VideoReDo" which was extremely comfy and quick as it only recoded when necessary.
The one thing really bothering me was that MCE never had a good way to shut down the system (after all recordings were done, perhaps with a grace period).
Instead, Microsoft expected the OEMs to configure Windows to enter a power-saving-mode when "nothing happened for x minutes". Very kludgy!
Some Dutch(?) fella then programmed an MCE extension to monitor recordings and shut down the system automatically and the problem was mostly solved.
This MCE forum ("Green Button"?) closed a long time ago.
When it finally broke down I was in the process of moving so I replaced it later with a PC built from standard parts and with Win 7 and its MCE.
As I got HD cable TV with my new flat I needed new tuners anyway and the new LG OLED-TV asked me personally to get HD content...
The PC got a case from Silverstone similar to this Gateway but without an VFD and I stuffed it with an Asus mainboard, a modern quadcore with built-in graphics and an SSD for the OS.
I then upgraded it with a second SSD to better cut movies and then with a quadruple-tuner TV card (with an SSD one could record 4 programs simulaneously, even while doing other stuff).
When I upgraded my main PC this media PC got a quiet Geforce 770 so it's smoother and it can now run (older) games in 1080p. The advantages of having a big case...
Where I live there are public broadcast channels in HD that show movies without ads in 720p with ridiculously good quality & Dolby digital sound (5 gigs/hour).
As I love older movies I'm very happy with that.
I cut them with a HD-capable version of VideoReDo and have more network storage than ever (around 40 TB right now).
Like many horders I now have thousands of recordings since 2006 and can watch anything I like when I like it. I have no use for streaming services with movies vanishing from them...
And, yes, this system still receives the regular EPG data from Microsoft, although only for the next few days (not 7 or 10 days like before).
When Microsoft drops this entirely I will switch over to NextPVR, I think.
I ran a hacked version of XP Media Center for a while, eventually moving on to Windows 7 Media Center. It worked well with my Cable Card, and I had a ton of recorded TV shows and Movies. I remember having to purchase a third-party app (cannot remember the name) to download Channel Guides for my area. I ran that box until sometime in 2015, when I finally made the move to Plex and HD HomeRun devices. Now I don't even watch Live TV, either downloaded or streamed content. Not sure I could go back, but it was fun times with WMC!
As a bonus you got Windows XP Professional features included as part of MCE instead of just home too. Hahahahaha I still chuckle knowing they had to include all the Windows Professional features because they were needed by MCE due to an oversight when designing the OS :D
My dad bought one for the family around 2006. He was so excited that it had hddvd. The rest of us knew better. Could never get the component working and the s-video had scaling issues on the projector. It sat in the corner while everyone just used the consoles, set top boxes, dvds, and later rokus. Eventually the keyboard battery corroded, so I parted it out and threw the ugly chassis in a dumpster.