Finally the big day has arrived! This year Microsoft has chosen to go with an update to Media Center 2005 rather than putting out a whole new version and branding it MCE 2006. The update goes under the name ‘Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005’ and is available free to all legally licensed MCE 2005 owners from Windows Update.
This update does put in place some changes for the Xbox 360 specifically but the update as a whole does have quite a lot of scope beyond that. The .net portions of Media Center now run through version 1.1 SP1 of the .net framework rather than 1.0 SP3. This in itself brings speed improvements.
With Rollup 2 Media Center is moving into 20 new countries this year (Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and Turkey), with 11 new languages.
In the USA the supported tuner number has been raised to 4 (comprised of two NTSC and two ATSC tuners), however for all other regions this has not been changed.
DVB-T/Freeview Radio is supported in Media Center now, and you can record it as well but on Media Center the radio does not ‘look’ the same. Media Center still does not support MHEG-5 (Standard used for ‘Enhanced Interactive Services’) so Media Center constructs a graph that only connects to the MPEG audio and displays a Media Center ‘Digital Audio Service’ Message on screen. In the UK the radio is delivered as ~64-192kbit. I was actually quite surprised when Hauppauge announced their own DVB-T radio plug-in since I’m sure they were aware of this feature (which is not tuner specific) being present in the update even when they first announced their beta. AC-3 audio over DVB-T is now also supported.
The UK channel exclusion list for DVB-T has been adjusted to remove E4 from the list. After upgrading to Rollup 2, E4 should be detected by simply performing a digital service scan. This avoids the unpleasantness required previously of diving into the registry and manually changing this.
A new power mode called ‘Away Mode’ is also introduced. This relies on support from the motherboards BIOS and as such is not going to be supported by all Media Center PCs (new machines). Essentially Away Mode shuts off audio and video but unlike other power modes it is able to respond to USB events and still perform tasks like recording TV in the background.
The updates to the DVD burning function are quite nice. The major feature being pushed on this is that you can now burn some HDTV shows with Media Center to produce a Standard Definition DVD (Should you have the Sonic Encoders installed). However something I think is probably one of the more useful fixes here is that the Sonic DVD engine should no longer die if it hits a discontinuity in the dvr-ms file (either broadcast related by not receiving data for that specific part of a show, or man made by using dvr-ms editing tools). The number of pictures you can have in a DVD slideshow has been increased from 99 and the ability to add content from other machines has been added.
An optimise feature has been added which will restart key Media Center services at a set time each day if Media Center is not in use. While it does allow better performance if you keep the system running day after day, the very inclusion of such a feature would seem to represent a quick fix to a larger problem in Media Center 2005.
With suitable hardware such as the Niveus Ice Vault a new feature called My DVDs becomes available which allows Media Center to work directly with a DVD Changer. When you then go to My DVDs on the main menu you are shown a list of all the films in your changer with names, cover art and other information which the machine will automatically fetch from the internet in the same way track information is fetched for Audio CDs in WMP.