As I prepare to rebuild the home theater at our house, I thought it was time to finally write the blog entry I've been promising myself (and a few others) regarding TiVo vs. Microsoft Media Center Edition (MCE) based Pc's.
Robert Scoble has been talking up the forthcoming MCE 2005 release of software and systems that are coming around towards the end of this year. Since Robert has not had the pleasure (?) of working with an MCE system , perhaps this will prepare him for what is coming.
TiVo units have been around for many years now, and are pretty much unchanged from when they were first introduced. Yes, they have significantly more storage, and with the latest upgrades, you can play audio and show pictures from your PC, but at the core, it's still a Linux based box running on minimal hardware with a user interface that pretty much anyone can figure out.
Let's review my most recent user experience with the last TiVo that I purchased. I picked it up at Best Buy for somewhere around $300. Brought it home, hooked it up and after maybe 30 minutes of trying to hide wires, had it up and running. It took roughly another 1 hour to finish configuring it and waiting for it to download and index all the information it needed. At some point after that I changed it to use a wireless network connection by using an 802.11b USB adapter from Linksys. The TiVo had no problem initially finding the network, but on occasion I found that it would have problems connecting and downloading its information. After a while I changed the 'channel' that the wireless network worked on, and that problem pretty much went away.
Besides the initial set up, over the course of a year, I spent maybe 30 minutes fixing the wireless lan problem. I cannot even remember if I had to physically turn the unit off (by pulling out the power cord - no power switch) during that whole time. In the time that I've owned TiVo's (pretty much since they came out), I've had to power off a unit due to a lockup maybe 5 times.
A MCE PC on the other hand is the height of PC technology. Rather than running a small Linux core with some custom programming around it for the TiVo functionality, it runs Windows XP Professional on top of which is layered the MCE functionality. The HP M390N that we use is a 3+ gigahertz Pentium 4 with 1 Gig of ram and 180 Gig of hard drive space. The TiVo runs some processor, with some amount of disk space. I'm not being stupid here - the point is that when it comes to the TiVo, you don't really care. I'll come back to this.
The set up with the MCE system was pretty straightforward. Besides the license agreement that took over 50 screens (seriously, it's that long and stupid) there isn't anything there that you as a PC user would find overly strange about it.
However, there is one caveat to this: The time was not set properly on the PC when it connected to the servers to obtain the program guide. Rather than simply saying that the time wasn't set right, it returned an error message that said basically, an unknown error has occurred. It took many hours of troubleshooting and finding forums that finally pointed me in the right direction. Not a good start.
The user interface (the 10 foot interface if you will) is very usable. Microsoft did a great job of providing functionality without cluttering things up too much.
Unlike the TiVo, the MCE system was to be at the center of our home theater. All sound would be routed through it, CD's would be ripped to it, and DVD's would be played through it. With the TiVo we had a Sony Dream System that provided sound and music handling - although eventually some music was handled through the TiVo).
Unfortunately, after the initial set up, things went downhill quickly. From the start, we had stability problems. The system would lock up at random or reboot on it's own. At first I thought this was due to overheating, so the PC came out of the cabinet to give it better airflow. That didn't help. After about two weeks of this, the machine finally died hard. It was returned to the store we I stupidly allowed them to service it rather than force them to swap it out (it was passed the return window). We were told that it would take about 5 days for the machine to be repaired. We were called a week later to be told that HP would have to repair the system and it would be sent out the next day. It took a week to figure that out? About a week after that we were called and told that the system had finally been sent out! Finally, two weeks later, we get the system back. Those major stability problems went away, so I was hopeful that we could at last enjoy the MCE PC and forget about the reliability problems. For your info: The culprit in the customer service debacle was CompUSA (and of course HP). I do not consider this part to be representitive of the problems that people might enounter, so while it soured my initial experience with the MCE PC, this by itself isn't a dealbreaker.
Finally, we have the machine back with a brand new motherboard and Pentium 4 chip. Happy days are here again (finally), right? Nope! At random the machine would become unresponsive, or we would have problem with sound. After much trial and error, we found that rather than muting the sound when we turned the TV off, we could just turn the volume all the way down and that improved reliability.
The system would still however act strange on occasion, so we continued experimenting. In the end we figured out that if we turned off 'live TV' by stopping it before we shut off the display, we solved most of the stability problems.
But not all of them. To this day, our screaming fast 3 Gig P4 still occasionally stumbles (defragged every night, doncha know), and every now and then it drives me to reboot it.
I won't even get into the MCE PC's inability to receive channel 2 from Comcast.
Watching DVDs can be horrible. We have the MCE PC connected to a widescreen display through a VGA connector. The PC knows it's a wide screen display, but when we go to play widescreen movies on the widescreen display, they end up being about 1/4 the height of the display. It's quite retarded. Because of that, we no longer watch DVD's on the PC, but until this latest rebuild of the home theater, would use an XBox to show the movies (and folks, it's a great game machine, but the XBox is not a great DVD player!).
So, comparing the $2000 HP Media Center PC versus the $300 TiVo, what do I recommend? Stick with the TiVo. Despite having dime store hardware, the TiVo generally is more reliable, easier to use, and frequently more reponsive than the PC. Some of the features of the MCE PC are really cool. Having all of our CD's in there is nice. Being able to create a DVD from a recorded show is nice, and having all the video editing features in there (in XP too of course) is nice. But without the turnkey reliability that is expected of home theater equipment, it doesn't matter how nice it is - it will not be accepted by the buyers of this equipment. I know that I have derailed many a potential buyer from getting an MCE PC. I don't want to support them, and I don't want to have to explain why they have to reboot 'their TV' every week.
Microsoft - you are 50% of the way there to getting a good fight going in the living room. However, if you don't significantly improve the MCE eXPerience, you will get booted out by one of the up and comers, and will have lost yet another huge market to someone willing to do it right. I'm even looking forward to the Media Center extenders that are supposed to be coming out soon, but don't count on my trying to help you sell any more product to other users until I'm convinced that you, in conjunction with your hardware partners, have this stuff straightened out. And the point above about it not mattering what kind of processor and memory that the TiVo unit has? It works better, and cheaper, and I KNOW it has something slow and cheap in there, as opposed to the uber fast Intel proc that is heating up the room where the equipment is located. This points out the obvious that the MCE PC is trying to do too much, and makes a very poor piece of home theater equipment.
Before anyone goes firing off salvos about how I'm expecting the MCE PC to do much more than the TiVo, you're right. But the MCE PC is failing in regards to the basics. The fact that we have all of our music ripped to it is nice, but given that it isn't so good as a PVR more than offsets the added advantages and features.
So there you have it, a long rambling piece on TiVo versus a Media Center Edition PC and why I still recommend TiVo.