Blog :: CharlieO

Charlie, Thanks for taking the time and below is my response from the comment section on my blog. I think it's really great that you guys are as involved as you are in communicating and blogging on MCE. It provides a very human and collaborative touch to the process and it's great to see these kinds of things coming from Microsoft. You guys are developing something extraordinary. Thanks again and keep up the good work.

Tom

Comment reply:

Thanks for the insightful post and I'm delighted that someone from Microsoft would take an interest. I think you are right on with the problem. The path, "Media Center with DirectTV = Source --> Encode to Digital --> Download to Set Top Box --> Decode to Analog --> Out to Media Center --> Encode to Digital --> Spool out to hard disk (equivalent to Download) --> Decode to Analog --> Out to Display" indeed is a different one than a direct connection from the satellite box and I'm sure that in there somewhere is where my problem is.

Part of my problem may be that I'm still using first generation hardware. I'm still using the HP 873N that I purchased back in October 2002 -- stock as shipped back then with the exception of an upgrade to the soundcard to get a fiber optic out. I have the original emuzed tuner, the original nvidia video graphics card, etc. I'd be interested in hearing if you thought switching any of these out would make a significant difference. I'd love to write about it if it did.

Although I have a DirectTV HDTV TiVo, this unit is input has no interaction with my MCE machine. I have a new Hughes box that was installed yesterday that is dedicated to the MCE machine. There is no standalone TiVo in the picture on this set up.

On this machine I did upgrade a fully working Media Center PC, the HP Pavillion 873N. It has been upgraded with each succesive MCE upgrade as released by Microsoft. The upgrade did not take this time and I had to do a clean reinstall and upgrade with HP. The upgrade process was difficult but what I feel is a poorer picture quality has remained constant from 2002.

Thanks again for your thoughts.