Windows XP Media Center versus SageTV

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After hearing about the Windows Media Center Edition PCs, I was glad to be able to see and compare them to a SageTV based Home Theater PC systems like mine.

At our local computer club, I saw a presentation of Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center. Microsoft's presenter did an excellent job of showing the new Media Center program functions added to the OS package, and how it could handle recording and playing video, playing music, showing digital video, downloading images from a digital camera, listening to music, and even burning a cdrom of music -- all from within the Media Center program.

He also demonstrated the Media Center Extender, which can provide full control and picture to a remote TV via Ethernet cable or 54Mb/sec WiFi. His demonstration units were a Gateway media center pc with two analog TV cards, a digital camera, a portable Windows Media Center player, a Windows Media Center Extender, a standard TV and some Ethernet cable, and associated remote controls.

He noted that WXP MCE 2005 would support up to two standard broadcast/cable TV cards and one broadcast High Definition card, and could record two normal shows and one HD show at one time. He mentioned doing other things on the PC while it was recording three shows, so these are apparently TV cards that have hardware encoding.

The system was a very impressive alternative to TiVo's offerings, and I'd certainly lean towards a MCE system, if I didn't have my own Home Theater PC already. WinXP MCE is only available to OEM's; the public's access is by purchasing preconfigured systems such as the Gateway that was demonstrated. Fortunately, however, I'm not in the market for one of these!

I have my own standard PC with WinXP Professional that I turned into a Home Theater PC, which has three Hauppauge PVR-250 cards, a video card with S-Video-out and running SageTV (from SageTV.com and a lot of hard drive capacity in the box and across my network. With my SageTV-based HTPC, I can do almost all the things a MCE system can, except handle broadcast HDTV, and can do a bunch of others. Both systems include their respective TV program guides (updated daily over the Internet) at no extra cost).