Windows 7 media center vs Boxee - findings so far

[marky_uk]

Hi all,

I'm running Boxee on Windows 7 - yep, I know my choice and I know not supported, but whatever I, and others here, can provide back to the boxee team and the community, then there may be more of an advantage than just renegades going off and doing their own thing :-)

It's a newly formatted drive, with just Windows 7, the right Intel 945 driver (see other posts regarding this), boxee, and Windows Media Center that's out of the box with Windows 7. No tweaks, mods, or anything. A media library of around 600GB of movies (2xavi file DIVXs, single avi file DIVXs and plenty of MKV files) , and around 800 albums of music.

And the short summary of where I am is clear so far -

boxee, with the internet-enabled community content is beautiful. It's very choppy under Windows 7, but that might be my powerline network adaptor I'm using to get back to the router on another floor. I'll investigate more later.

Album presentation and when playing music, in MCE has come on leaps and bounds, and at the moment, whoops boxee. Presentation is just much nicer for music in Windows MCE.

The most surprising so far is movie playback - stuttering and almost unwatchable in boxee, beautiful in Windows MCE. That's the same local file, with just one app open at once. I've got the Wndows 7 codec pack - so that's being used by Windows MCE, and it's smooth and great. I'm not sure what boxee is using, and how I should tweak it best. If someone wants to have a stab with me, then feel free and I'll try some settings and report back - I know there's a lot of scope in playback settings under boxee, but I'm afraid my knowledge is not enough to choose the right option.

Hope that helps someone. I know Windows 7 isn't going to be far around the corner, and that people who choose boxee at the moment are tech evangelists, so assume quite a few might start getting this issue with playback and we can help each other.

Marky_UK

[mwreeves]

I am a die-hard fan of boxee and completely support its mission to create internet media content remote friendly. I just got windows 7 and happened upon WMC by accidentally pushing the button on my remote. After using both for a while here are my thoughts:

Internet Media: Although both contain applications for internet media, Boxee exceeds all expectations and leaves WMC everything to be desired. WMC is only linked to MSN online content which has podcasts from history channel and others, but hardly makes it worth checking for new content. Boxee, with its extensive online content and ever-increasing repositories, makes it unbeatable.

Local content cataloging: WMC uses standard titles for browsing and I found it fairly confusing at first to navigate. Boxee, although I found it annoying at first to use the system to recognize media, it has been incredible to have everything listed in that way and to have info about every episode. Again, Boxee surpasses WMC.

The only reason that I will still be using WMC is because of the soon promise of netflix. Microsoft has implied that they will be adding netflix onto their service. I believe that this will come sooner than it will to boxee. Although the look of WMC, the functionality of boxee wins every time.

[samcraig]

Boxee is great, Vista Media Center is great, and Zinc is great. I have them all intergrated and I have to say the setup is perfect. I have media center for ota with the plugin secondrun.tv for cartoon network. using menu mender I added boxee and zinc to media center for all the wonderful things they offer. I have 2 antennas on 1 pole pointed at 2 diff farms so i pick up 38 channels, cleveland and youngstown, wich will be great now that its football season :). Ive even been thinking of getting another antenna to pck up pits local.
All in all the only thing I miss about cable is nickelodeon and disney for the kids. Secondrun.tv has cartoon network but it also has alot of bugs and makes it very dificult to just enjoy.
Boxee, zinc, and media center all have greatness in them but I cant say 1 dominates the other. They all have there special quirks to them. Boxee has comedy central but for some reason not all the shows show up and Zinc has them all and seems to play the content smoother, also zinc has crackle. Boxee has current, wich I am for some reason addicted too now, and you can load the justintv streams wich is wonderful. And lets not forget the Hulu app, add that to media center and you have more tv then you can watch.