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August 01, 2003
TiVo vs. Media Center
There's been some talk about TiVo vs. Windows XP Media Center Edition. Michael praises XPMCE's flexibility, so I went over and took a look. Flexible, yes, but they've got the ergonomics all wrong. To use my TiVo, I plop down on the couch, click on my 25" Toshiba and surf the menus with an infrared remote. If I understood what I saw in the tour, to use XPMCE I have to pull my chair up to a desk, boot up, click a mouse a bunch of times, listen to the noisy whir of a computer fan and finally get to watch my program on a 15" monitor.
Posted by Andrew Grumet at August 1, 2003 10:12 AM
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you can connect most media center PCs to TVs. Mine is hooked up to a 60" Toshiba
Posted by: Michael Gartenberg at August 1, 2003 06:15 PMHi Michael, thanks for the clarification. I'm curious about the human factors -- I wasn't able to tell from the online tour whether you could control media center from the safety of the couch. How do you start, stop, pause etc?
I suppose if there's no infrared, you might still be able to use WiFi to "Remote Desktop" to it, using a laptop or iPaq...
Hi, all Media CEnter PCS have a remote control as part of the spec. Once your'e in the 10 foot UI of the MPC, you can do everything you can do with a TiVO. They are different products and a lot of your choice depends on what you want to do and how flexible do you need your content to be.
Posted by: Michael Gartenberg at August 2, 2003 09:57 PM