Windows XP Media Center Edition: Exposed

So how well does it work?

The TV aspect of MCE is obviously its biggest selling point and thus the question on everyone's mind is how well it functions as a PVR.

We've already established that MCE's interface does a terrific job of competing with the likes of TiVo and ReplayTV, not to mention completely dominating anything we've seen from ATI and NVIDIA, but how well does the entire package function?

Although MCE is by far the best first attempt at a PVR we've seen from any company, it isn't without its very noticeable flaws; the most serious of which happens to be this issue of performance. On a 2.53GHz Pentium 4, CPU utilization hovers around 30 - 40% while simply watching TV; note that this is with a hardware MPEG-2 encoder card and a very fast Pentium 4 CPU. We tried performing our own clean MCE install on the setup, updated all of the drivers and walked away with nothing better. There are clearly some issues with MCE as it shouldn't require such a high speed CPU to perform simple MPEG-2 decoding and writing to the disk. The CPU utilization drops to below 20% if MCE is closed and it's just recording in the background, which isn't too bad but still higher than you'd expect for a hardware MPEG-2 encoding engine that isn't relying on the host CPU.

The high CPU utilization only really becomes a problem when you're doing other things in the background that also eat up a ton of CPU time, such as quickly flipping through the program guide or starting the guide up for the first time. As we mentioned before, this is mainly an issue with allowing other threads to compete with the TV encoding/decoding threads for CPU time. We can understand that Microsoft wants to let people use MCE as both a media center OS and as a regular OS for work and play, but there's no excuse for stuttering caused within the Media Center interface itself.

Then there's the issue of crashes; in its default configuration, the HP Media Center PC wasn't the most stable computer we've encountered. But after a clean install without much of the junk HP loads and with fully updated drivers, the system was much more reliable. Even with our reinstall, there have been cases where the Media Center application crashed, requiring a full system restart before functioning properly. Other times it just required us to close the Media Center application and reopen it before we were able to continue watching our TV. In the end the stability issues weren't too prevalent, but with a PVR any sort of crashes are unacceptable. It will be interesting to see if other hardware configurations would lead to more reliable Media Center PCs.

Other than the performance issues and occasional crash, MCE works quite well as a PVR, even eclipsing TiVo and ReplayTV in features, functionality and interface in some cases. Compared to other PC based PVR solutions, MCE's major advantage is its very polished user interface; whether it is ATI, NVIDIA or SnapStream, they can all perform the same basic functions as MCE but all lack the interface that will allow MCE to penetrate living rooms and truly make the PC seem like a set-top PVR. ATI comes the closest but without a truly immersive UI they cannot touch MCE in this respect, but from a functionality standpoint they can do just about everything MCE does already. The functionality of MCE isn't fundamentally new, it's just packaged in such a way that it can reach a much larger breadth of users.

Because the performance issues are directly tied to multiple threads of execution contending for CPU time, MCE may end up being best suited for use on a Hyper-Threading enabled Pentium 4. It may not be a coincidence that the first full year of MCE's availability will be the same year that Hyper-Threading fully transitions to mainstream desktop processors...