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.

4 thoughts on “TiVo vs. Media Center”

  2. Hi 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…

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  3. 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.

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  4. Well the thing a bout Tivo is you have to pay a monthly charge and everything but Media Centre has no recurring charges. Personally I like to have the ability to record tv programs and send it to my laptop for viewing on the road.

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