microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter.hometheaterpc

Long-form reference · 1,917 words · about a 8-minute read

The group and its era

The home-theatre PC was a simple proposition with complicated plumbing: a computer that sat under the television rather than on a desk, driven by a remote from three metres away, doing the work of a video recorder, a DVD player and a photograph album at once. Microsoft’s version was Windows XP Media Center Edition, first available in North America in October 2002 and never sold as a boxed copy: it came on a finished machine, reaching system builders in certain countries later.

Revisions came at annual intervals and were named a year ahead of themselves: the 2004 edition shipped in September 2003, the 2005 edition in October 2004, with a final update rollup in October 2005. After XP the software stopped being an edition of Windows and became a feature of one, included in Vista’s Home Premium and Ultimate and in every Windows 7 edition but Starter and Home Basic. The group’s working span covers the years when Media Center was still a reason to buy a PC.

The reason was hardware. Microsoft judged the requirements strict enough that it would not sell Media Center as an independent retail product, distributing it to MSDN subscribers and to original equipment manufacturers in certain countries; a buyer acquired it preinstalled on a computer, a set-top box or an embedded device. The 2004 edition was at least offered as an upgrade to owners of an original licence, and the 2005 edition was the first available to system builders outside the largest tier.

That arrangement set the terms for anyone who wanted to build the machine rather than buy it. The parts list was constrained as tightly as the licence: Media Center wanted tuners with a standardised driver interface and closed-caption support, and remote controls standardised in their button labels and, to a degree, their layout. Assembling the right components, in the right country, from a supplier willing to sell the licence with them was itself a piece of research.

microsoft.public.* was Microsoft’s own public NNTP hierarchy, run on the company’s news servers and mirrored across the wider feed; it is described on the microsoft.public.excel.programming page, and Microsoft closed the newsgroups in stages during 2010 in favour of web forums.

What was discussed

The dominant genre was diagnostic: a machine, a tuner card, a signal source and a symptom, posted in the hope that someone had met the same combination. Tuner hardware came first, because Media Center spoke only to cards presenting a standardised driver interface, and early versions expected a hardware MPEG-2 encoder on the card itself — so a tuner that worked in a windowed television application might not appear in Media Center at all.

That rule loosened rather than lifted. Card makers wrote drivers to bring existing products inside it — ATI’s All-In-Wonder and HDTV Wonder boards were supported under the 2005 edition — but Media Center stayed more restricted in the hardware it accepted than most other DVR software of the period, and the number of tuners it would drive at once was set by the version of the software rather than by the slots in the case.

Then the remote. Most systems used an infrared receiver on a USB cable plus an IR blaster: a small emitter taped over the sensor window of a cable or satellite box, through which the PC changed that box’s channels on the recording schedule’s behalf. Blasters that fired at the wrong moment, changed channel twice, or worked until the box’s firmware was updated supplied a steady stream of threads, as did guide data and the ten-foot interface.

Formats were the other constant. Recorded television went into Microsoft’s own container — DVR-MS in the XP and Vista years, WTV from the 2008 TV Pack onward — raising recurring questions about playing recordings elsewhere, converting them, and what could be moved at all when the source carried content protection. Extenders moved the same problems onto the network: the Xbox 360, which gained the function in the October 2005 rollup and shipped with it built in from its launch a month later, put the interface on a second television without a second PC.

American readers had a further ordeal. CableCARD, the separable-security card the FCC had required cable operators to supply, made premium digital cable technically possible on a PC. Vista supported it only on complete OEM systems certified by CableLabs; Windows 7 relaxed that to existing hardware meeting certain requirements. A Media Center PC was a one-way receiver, so video on demand and pay-per-view stayed out of reach; by 2016 retail cards numbered some six hundred thousand against tens of millions in operators’ boxes.

Tuners, standards and conditional access

Nothing about a television signal is universal. The European family of standards, DVB, is published by a joint technical committee of ETSI, CENELEC and the European Broadcasting Union, and divides by delivery: separate specifications for terrestrial, satellite and cable. A card bought for one was no use for another, and within a single variant the frequencies, the multiplexes and the listings were arranged nationally rather than continentally, so a set-up carried across a border did not simply resume.

Media Center drew a narrower boundary than the standards did. Standard- and high-definition video were supported unencrypted through DVB-T and ATSC; encrypted cable channels could be reached only through a tuner supporting CableCARD, a North American arrangement. Free-to-air reception was, in effect, the part of European television the documentation covered, and no equivalent to the CableCARD arrangement is recorded on the European side.

The European features also arrived late and awkwardly. DVB-T came with the October 2005 rollup; digital sub-channels, QAM, DVB-S and MHEG came with the Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008, codenamed Fiji, which Microsoft distributed only through OEMs on new machines and never offered as an update to existing installations. An owner of a working Vista Media Center could not add satellite support: the choice was a new computer, or Windows 7, whose Media Center included much of what the pack had added.

Recordings that would not travel

A recording was not a file in a neutral format. Under XP and Vista it was written as DVR-MS: audio and video wrapped in Microsoft’s ASF container, video encoded as MPEG-2 and audio as MPEG-1 Audio Layer II or Dolby Digital AC-3, the standards extended to carry metadata and rights management. The files came from the Stream Buffer Engine, a DirectShow component introduced in Windows XP Service Pack 1, which is why an unprotected recording opened on any Windows machine from that service pack onward and elsewhere only through a player that had implemented the format.

Protection was the part that generated complaint. If a broadcast arrived marked as copy protected, the resulting DVR-MS file could be played back only on the device that had recorded it, which turned a transfer to a laptop or an archive disc into a dead end. In May 2008 Microsoft confirmed that shipping versions adhered to the broadcast flag, after reports that users had been blocked from recording particular NBC broadcasts; the FCC rule that would have obliged receivers to honour the flag had been set aside by the D.C. Circuit in 2005. No equivalent signal was in general use in European DVB transmissions.

From the TV Pack 2008 onward the container changed to WTV, which no longer used ASF underneath and which Microsoft did not open to third-party players on Vista or XP Media Center Edition with a general DirectShow filter. Windows 7 shipped a conversion the other way, turning WTV recordings that were not copy protected back into DVR-MS. The qualification carried the whole difficulty: what could be moved could be moved, and what could not stayed on the disc that had written it.

Context

Because television is a national institution, the group was really two conversations sharing an address. North American posters worked with NTSC and ATSC, QAM cable and a set-top box in the loop; European posters worked with analogue systems giving way to DVB-T, and with DVB-S satellite. Media Center gained DVB-T support only in the October 2005 rollup, so European posters had spent the early years on analogue capture or waiting. Guide listings, channel line-ups and the software’s availability varied by country, so answering a question began with establishing where the asker lived.

The enthusiasm ran from roughly 2003 to 2008, and then the premise dissolved. Microsoft disbanded the Media Center development team shortly after Windows 7 shipped in 2009; the software was left out of Windows 8 and sold as an add-on instead, and in May 2015 Microsoft confirmed that Windows Media Center would not continue into Windows 10, which removes it on upgrade. Streaming services, cheap dedicated boxes and televisions with the software built in had made a general-purpose computer an expensive way to fill a screen.

Read from the convergence coverage that treated the merging of monitor and television as a certainty, the archive is a corrective. Convergence did arrive, but inside the television set and inside a cheap appliance rather than inside the living-room PC — and what this group preserves is the list of obstacles, drivers and standards and licences and infrared, that stood between the demonstration and the sitting room.

The appliance that replaced it

The retreat can be read in the price list. Media Center was in no edition of Windows 8; it came back as the Media Center Pack, sold only for retail copies of Windows 8 Pro, with a Pro Pack at US$69.99 for those who had to reach Pro first. The pack was free from 26 October 2012 to 31 January 2013, then US$9.99, and was withdrawn on 30 October 2015. The listings service outlived it: the guide service was declared at an end on 14 January 2020, the day support for Windows 7 ended, and data in fact kept arriving into the first week of April.

What took the machine’s place was deliberately smaller. A digital media player is a compact box or a stick in an HDMI socket, driven by a remote through a ten-foot interface, and it usually has no tuner for terrestrial television, no disc drive and no capacity to record; smart televisions fold the same software into the set. The functions this group spent its years on — the tuner, the guide, the scheduled recording, the file left on a disc afterwards — are the ones the successor devices left out.