One of our family gifts this year (the other was a Saturn 2005 Relay) was a Media Center PC. We’ve moved the TiVO out of our family room and into the master bedroom. I felt a little melancholy unplugging the TiVo and moving it from its home for the last couple years. TiVO has been our family room friend for several years, has the dust marks to prove it, and has provided many, many hours of TV entertainment but at the same time, I didn’t really see the logic buying a new one for the use of the expanded hard drive size and media capabilities when we could purchase a Windows Media Center PC and then swap out the harddrive with bigger ones as they come along (terabyte drives, anyone?)

Also, something which furthered our purchase decision was TiVO’s plans to add commercials during fast forward skip. We haven’t completely cast TiVo aside yet, but since we rarely watch TV in the bedroom it’s now one small step from being disconnected. I’ll have more to say about the Media Center as we become more familiar with it, but here’s some things I noticed when setting it up:

• setup was fairly easy except for problems getting audio to work. We used s-video and piped the audio through our sound system from the computer soundcard. No HD video card sucks, but that’s not the media center’s fault, we’ll just have to replace the card with an HD card as soon as we can. Our HDTV doesn’t support the digital to digital signal, so we either need a better TV or better video card
• Took us a little bit of fumbling to figure out how to get back to PC mode from Media Center mode. To get back to PC mode you press the Windows button on the remote (see picture above with yellow arrow pointing to Windows button) and navigate to the upper left corner
• The “more info” button on the remote when used on the channel guide will allow modifying the channels in the guide actually received.
  
  
  
  The default is all channels and we don’t have all channels. As of this writing we have Comcast HD cable and only have Starz and Encore as the pay channels, we don’t currently have HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc. Used to have HBO, but it seems like Starz has the most movies and we are most interested as a family in movies. I like sports and would prefer Showtime or HBO for sports, but I’m the minority on this vote.
• When searching for movies Media Center displays cool looking DVD boxes and much more detail about the movies than TiVO does including cast and bios.
  
  
  
  
• No feature that automatically records programs based on thumbs up or thumbs down. This is one feature that seems only TiVo has? We like this feature but the problem is that as a family our likes are diverse and TiVo has only done a semi-decent job going on a record mission for the family. Some of what it thinks we might like are something nobody in the family likes. Still, I’ll miss this feature … anybody know any program for the Media Center that adds this type of functionality? Imagine being logged in as different users on the machine and having thumbs up profile functionality for each user? So when the kids are watching they get a different set of favorites than when Mom and Dad are watching. Possibilities with a PC seem greater with a PC. The media center does show you similar movies when you find a movie you like that you’ve already seen.
  
  
• The Media Center PC comes with dual DVD drives and a DVD burner … talk about keeping those favorite shows around forever. This is something we couldn’t do with TiVO. Score one for Media Center
• Same as TiVo, you can’t watch a different program while recording a program, which sort of sucks if you only have one TV and one cable box (fortunately, we have two boxes, so we can just go into the other room while its recording). I wonder if with dual cable boxes and graphic cards if this would be possible on the Media Center PC?
  
  

Pretty much the only time I watch TV is while eating or when a major sporting event is on. And sometimes I watch TV through the WinTV card on my computer, so I’m not sure how much action this Media Center will get from me, but one thing is for sure, TiVo is definitely looking at getting the boot. I’m sort of hoping, if things go the way they look to be going, all the fellow TiVo fans will stop by and tell us how much we’ll regret unplugging the TiVO for good? Grade: B+

Update: TiVo vs. Windows XP Media Center 2005 [via TiVoblog]
Tivo vs. Windows XP Media Center 2005 [via obviousdiversion]

• My sister’s new Media Center PC isn’t hooked up to their TV
• Windows Media Center 2005 new user woes
• Review: Comcast HDTV PVR with Microsoft TV
• Reasons why we returned Windows Media Center 2005
• We’re thinking about nuking cable and Netflix
• Advertisers plan to reduce TV commercial budget by twenty percent, says study