There are a number of “little” things that I would like to see fixed in MCE, I will use this post to track those items as I think of them. Off the top of my head the following come to mind:
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No recommendations – My TIVO knew me fairly well, this is something I miss; it would be great if MCE had a recommendations engine, this could be based off of the shows I watch, the shows I record, maybe even the stuff my friends watch and record; one of the coolest un-used features in MCE is the click2record files, I would probably publish my series recordings to a RSS feed and let my friends subscribe to it.
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Persistent Guide Filters – I almost always just watch HD, I don’t want to remove the non-HD channels because sometimes I get desperate and will just watch SD; it would be great if MCE had a way to set the default guide filter, a even simpler thing that would still make my life easier would be to make it so when I use the “back stack” (previous button) and I go to back to the guide it came up with the same filter it had on when I was last there.
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Time Synchronized Audio/Video – I now have Media Center (via extenders) in every room there is a TV, I would LOVE to be able to watch and/or listen to the same content on all of those displays; otherwise I need to go buy a Roku too and I already have a big investment in a general purpose platform, I just want it to do this for me.
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DVD remoting – Again I have a big investment in Media Center, I would love to be able to remote all of my DVDs natively in Media Center; the platform has all of the right DRM pieces to do this in such a way that the rights of the content owners could be respected the incremental work just needs to be done to make it a reality.
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Whole house DRM – I am no fan of DRM, but I do accept it as a necessary evil; with that being said its shameful that if I record content on my PC in the garage with the CableCard receiver that I can not watch it on the PC upstairs but I can watch it on any of the extenders targeted at the PC: technologically I understand why this is the case but as a user I don’t want to care.
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Heterogeneous Tuners – I want to be able to arbitrarily mix-and-match tuners, analog, digital, over the air, dvb it should not matter; it should just work.
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Whole house tuner management – My son is always asking me if he can record stuff on the “main” media center PC I always have to say no, use your PC I don’t want to miss my shows; but if we had whole house tuner management and one of the tuners in the house were free this could just work, part of the same problem is the Whole house DRM problem I mentioned earlier.
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More intelligent displays for photos – I don’t want to look at my photos based on the folders they are in, leverage all the meta-data the OS and tools on the OS put in the content to show the photos in a more rational way.
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Give me a way to stream my content – I know have this kick as repository for content on my home network, I would love to be able to stream this content to my PC at work or at a hotel with a first class user experience.
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Give me a way to sync my content intelligently with my portable media devices – We have a Zune and a IPOD I wish there was some magical way to synchronize content based on the meta-data that Media Center maintains for content to these devices, pre-stage the content for me using space clock cycles; for example I would love to say “Keep the latest Entourage on my Zune” and have the content always ready to sync, and automatically sync when the device is near.
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Make it possible to record content to my network storage, or make it automatic to migrate the content to my network storage – Nuf’ said.
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Make it possible to migrate the content from my XBOX 360 to my Media Center PC – I should never need to touch my Media Center PC, just have my family drop a music CD in the 360 and it should be ripped and migrated to the Media Center PC.
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Let me run MCE on WHS – Windows Home Server is cool, I like lots of its features but it doesn’t offer sufficient functionality for me to warrant the addition of yet another PC that is on 24 hours a day; I use my MCE like a home server let me merge them together; still charge me the license for each if you like but make it so I can consolidate them.
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Provide a “portal” where DVD rental services can integrate – I think one of the reasons we don’t see Netflix and Blockbuster integration with MCE from a queue management standpoint is that they have to do quite a bit of work, building the rich experience supporting it, etc; if they could just provide a library that implemented the appropriate web services protocol that was front ended by a branded (just logo and maybe basic branded text) then the bar would be lowered significantly; vendors who wanted richer integration could build a full on application while those who just wanted to enable basic queue management could do so inexpensively, this is particularly interesting when you consider how many of these services exist globally.