What is Windows Media Center? Well that is what I am going to try to explain in this post. Don't get me wrong, this will not be the only post on WMC (Windows Media Center) but this will be a starting point. Let me first tell you that I have been living with WMC for about year to a year and a half. I first started using WMC on windows Vista then moving to install the TV-Pack, and now on Windows 7. I use it on a daily basis to watch OTA (Over the Air) TV and downloaded internet videos from such sources as Revision3. Let's first start with a brief understanding of what WMC is. Put simply WMC is a computer based DVR (Digital Video Recorder). WMC first came about in Windows XP Media Center Edition. I believe, in my opinion when WMC came out in XP people didn’t exactly understand what it was or did. Also around that time there weren’t many TV tuner cards available. As time progressed more tuner cards became available and more people began to see the potential of WMC. In my opinion, WMC did not really hit its stride till Vista Media Center came out and provided the ability to use the new OTA standard ATSC (ATSC is the standard for OTA HDTV). This is when I began to use WMC. When Vista was still in beta I started to buy ATSC tuner cards to use with WMC and at that time they were about $120.00 a piece for a single tuner card. Fast forward to today and you can purchase a duel tuner ATSC tuner card for about $70.00 from Newegg. So as you can see WMC has evolved very quickly over a fairly short period of time. When I did start to use it I compared it to the DVR I was using at that time from our cable company. The software my cable company was using at that time on their DVR’s was Moxi. Now Moxi is a very user friendly interface compared to current DVR software my cable company using.

Cable Company Recorded TV Interface

Media Center Recorded TV Interface

Anyway, when I started to compare the Moxi software against WMC I found that WMC is way more useful. The first and most important way in which WMC is more useful is WMC’s multi-room viewing capability. You might ask what multi-room viewing is because very few if any cable company offers this service. AT&T U-verse does offer multi-room. What multi-room allows you to do is pause or stop a show in one room and pick up where you left off in another. I must clarify that this only works on recorded TV or currently recording TV. On a side note, as of right now it does not work with live TV. Also WMC does not allow recording of the live TV buffer as of right now. Hopefully this will be fixed in a later version. The second useful capability of WMC is being able to have more than two TV tuners for watching and recording TV. An example of this is the current setup I use, which is 3 ATSC HDTV tuner cards. So I am able to ether record 3 TV shows and watch an already recorded show, or I can watch one live channel and record two other channels. And at any time I can add more tuners as needed. At this point I will let you soak all this information in and think how / if WMC could work for you. Please check back for Part2 – How it all Works Together.