I hear this complaint often, and it's mostly garbage (sorry). Here's
the reality: MS isn't the one pushing hard on DRM (that would be stuff
like Itunes). And, MS has made themselves open enough that using MKV
or other containers work very well.. far better then in any software
I've found; and it's add-on friendly nature works.
DRM is a staple of technologies like BluRay, Netflix, VoD, CableCards,
etc. So, MS supports those. Which is OK, because I tend to want
those as part of my media center.
Media Player Classic is cool to watch videos with. It is completely
NOT wife friendly, and setting up easy commands or a video wall with MPC
is not possible. VLC is, frankly, crap. It uses outdated FFDShow,
has absolutely no intent to support LAV, will not bitstream HD audio
codecs, and does a really crappy job of showing what it does support.
I mean, I suppose it's cool for the days when I worried about DVDs
ripped to shitty DiVX, but hell, I'll store DVDs in ISO because 9GB is
nothing.
I have a pair of PS3s in the house, and their media services do work
for DLNA/etc. But navigating through terrabytes of shows & movies?
I can dial up MediaBrowser in media center, and tell it "show me every
movie with Forrest Whitacker" and it will hunt my movie archive,
anything upcoming on cable, tv shows.. whatever. And I can pick with a
remote control and instantly chose from a wall of movie posters or TV
show banners. That's intuitive.
I get the whiplash against DRM. But a media center isn't really a
media center to me unless it can record TV, relay it to multiple rooms,
etc. Right now, in my MCE, I have 12 tuners (Footlong/TunerSalad) 2
Ceton CableCard tuners (8) and 2 Analog cable, 2 QAM. So, technically,
I can record 11 shows, watch another, or whatever. I put aside 3TB to
TV storage.. and thanks to CableCard, I had the option last night to
record StarZ "Boss" (which turned out to be very good) while I watched
SuperNatural on QAM and recorded Blue Bloods elsewhere to watch on
Sunday.
I guess that's the thing.. I get the frustration; but to me, a media
center isn't a media center unless all of it comes together. Thanks to
plugins, I can search everything everywhere and "bam" get an answer.
Plugins like Media Browser, MyTV, SecondRunTV, Netflix.. pretty much
anything I want is there.
But, again, it's all about what you're after.
On Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:58:15 -0700, Joshua MacCraw wrote:
I don't like microsoft philosophy on drm thus I have not loaded any
of their
newer players and I always use a third party player like media player
classic or VLC on my pc's. I follow the same philosophy about their
marketing hyped crap DVR dvr system.
You do not need a console to use PMS, it's a dnla standard compliant
server
that was originally written to support PS3. TVERSITY is another. Both
are
freeware & opensource that run on PC.
On Oct 22, 2011 12:48 PM, "Anthony Q. Martin" <[email protected]>
wrote:
Why? MC works well. I don't own a game console.
