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Sign Up Now: In his Fast Forward weekly e-letter, Personal tech editor Rob Pegoraro keeps you posted on the latest gear and gadgets (Delivered every Monday).
By Rob Pegoraro Sunday, October 20, 2002; Page H07
I have often joked that the inevitable result of the "convergence" of television and computer would be the need to reboot your TV every now and then.
That actually happened this week. Twice.
The TV in question came embedded in a computer, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft's new Media Center PC -- an ambitious but flawed attempt to fuse a PC with a home theater. The system, due in stores at the end of this month, has some clever innovations but makes sense only to peculiarly dedicated audio/videophiles.
It's not for lack of hardware. The Media Center PC 883N system I tested was built around a 2.66-gigahertz Pentium 4 processor, 512 megabytes of high-speed memory, a 115-gigabyte hard disk, a CD-ROM reader and a CD-RW/DVD+RW combo drive. It's ready for just about any multimedia peripheral imaginable, with two FireWire and six universal-serial-bus 2.0 ports, plus front-panel slots for CompactFlash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital and SmartMedia memory cards. This configuration also included a six-speaker Klipsch surround-sound rig (combined shipping weight: 80 pounds). It will sell for $1,999, monitor not included; cheaper Media Center configurations start at $1,400.
Setting up this gear, however, combined the worst aspects of home-theater assembly and desktop-PC installation. After untangling numerous wires, clearing out room for the hulking subwoofer and guessing which plugs went where, I had a roomful of speakers but no surround sound.
A 73-minute toll call to HP tech support brought life to the rear speakers (and an unwanted familiarity with the PC's lineup of redundant sound-control panels) while leaving the center speaker and subwoofer mute. A further round of calls revealed that I had to load yet another control-panel interface to enable six-channel sound.
Take a moment to try to remember the last time you debugged the driver software on a stereo. Or a Mac.
The point of all this multimedia componentry is Microsoft's new Media Center software, which lets you watch TV, DVDs and video recordings, browse pictures, and listen to music from across the room with an included remote control. This clean-slate interface is wonderfully free of right-click menus, tabbed dialogue boxes and all the other visual pollution of Windows. Instead, you see simple lists of choices in large type at the left, with the object of your attention -- a folder of pictures, a television broadcast, the programming guide, a music playlist -- on the right.
Navigation with the remote's buttons is graceful and efficient, and you never feel as though you're going to get lost -- unless you select one of a few commands that flick you back into the regular, small-type Windows interface.
The Media Center PC's most notable feature is its ability to record TV to the hard drive, augmented by a free programming guide that lets you pick shows to watch or "tape" with a tap of the remote. Like TiVo and ReplayTV, Media Center can pause or rewind live TV. And like any other computer program, it can crash.
After I changed a time-zone setting, Media Center rejected all new recording settings until I rebooted the machine. I had to restart the PC again after Media Center failed to awake from sleep mode. (Microsoft said the first glitch was a bug, while the second was probably due to wrinkles in HP's almost-final software setup.)
In its original design, Microsoft prevented people from exporting TV recordings anywhere, but it relented after being denounced for this craven obedience to the movie industry's dictates. You will be able to copy TV recordings onto a DVD, provided the broadcast wasn't tagged with a do-not-copy flag (none are today).
But you won't be able to watch those recordings anywhere but other Media Center PCs until Microsoft ships the next version of Windows Media Player and third-party developers support the proprietary format that Microsoft wraps around these files.
In the DVD-playback, picture-viewing and music-listening modes, Media Center is essentially a read-only version of Windows XP's existing multimedia software, with a much cleaner interface but radically limited capabilities. If you want to listen to Internet radio, watch computer-generated visualizations of music, create a song playlist or add some MP3s to your library, you'll have to retreat to Windows Media Player.
The remaining limits to the Media Center PC are all HP's fault. The company includes only a trial version of an MP3 encoder, an act of nickel-and-dime nonsense that makes people who just paid $2,000 for the PC pay another $10 to copy CDs in something besides Windows Media format. HP's install also omits essential QuickTime and Real media software.
But the biggest issue with the Media Center PC is where to put it.
Most living rooms already host a TV bigger than any computer monitor, plus a comfy couch. That's where any across-the-room listening and viewing is likely to happen, not in a den or bedroom. Meanwhile, most new computers already work fine for collecting and enjoying pictures, video and music up close. Unless you can relocate your computer desk to a spot within a few feet of your TV, the Media Center PC seems homeless.
Instead of duplicating hardware we already own, the logical, elegant solution would be a wireless link between the computer in the den and the screen and speakers elsewhere in the house. Let the PC do what it does best, creating and managing all this neat digital content, but leave the display to the far superior output devices in front of the coffee table.
Unfortunately, you can't find such a gadget in any mass-market stores. Yet.
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.
