Windows XP Media Center 20th Anv. - Gateway FMC-901X

I've never used MCE specific drivers on WinXP MCE and never had any problems... I have a couple machines with it, one HP and one OEM and never had problems with games or the MCE software with generic XP drivers. Only used the 2005 and newer now that I think about it! Great video...

mce was a huge part of my childhood along with dvdshrink and other tv show and dvd copying programs :) i remember as a kid being so jealous of a friend with TiVo, and then i got a gateway media center pc. life changing~ , recording tv shows and skipping commercials was like the future to me haha..

On Windows Weekly several years ago Paul said that Media Center was the top feature that folks wanted continued but Microsoft killed it because their is more money in streaming then selling MCE. If Media Center with live tvguide data existed today with solid cablecard support I would likely have cable today.

When I first looked at Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, I thought there was just Professional and Home Edition until I found out in 2016. This was similar to like what our Sony SAT-T60 DIRECTV TiVo had.

This thing is mind bogglingly fluid and lag-free. How is it so much better than any modern cable box and most android tv boxes and smart TVs

cool video 😉

Truly an incredible machine.
I have an MSI Media Center that I paid around $40 for. I upgraded it with a new processor, maximum RAM, and two hard drives. It also has a VFD display, composite and S-video outputs, and a Hauppauge card. I'm using it to convert my old VHS tapes. I found very little information about it on the internet; I believe they were somewhat obscure machines with few units produced.
Great video as always.

My computer in college had XP Media Center edition. It was just a standard off-the-shelf budget HP desktop tower from (I believe) Office Depot. No TV tuner, no video inputs, no remote, no fancy display, none of that fancy entertainment center dressing... though I did already have my own TV tuner that I put in it. I do remember that interface starting on bootup though, and it always seemed kind of pointless to me, I guess now it makes sense why!

another good example would have been those HP Media Centers that too had rca and av/tuner ports.

Back in the day I got a normal Dell desktop that shipped with media center 2005. It seems like the licensing for these was just completely arbitrary

As of today, there's still a way to install windows media center on windows 11, though not by official means, but it works.

I really loved MCE 05

I rocked a Media Center PC until windows stopped supporting the guide updates and went to PLEX. I loved Windows Media Center I had a full HD 6 tuner Ceton setup with Xbox 360 and Ceton Echos to watch live TV and all my media in other rooms. I always like the Windows Media center interface and the normal looking remote you could use with an IR receiver. It was said to see Microsoft kill it off, but I can understand why. Guest I'm stuck with PLEX now and I can't remember the last time I watched a TV show. Great video and it brought back some old memories.

There was a bug that whenever i would close the Prince of Persia T2T game the Media Center program would launch on its own, really weird.

An amazing OS, I can't believe they didn't continue it.

a cake fan :)

I had one of the HP ones, yea that thing ruled. Im pretty sure i still have that remote with the plastic still on it lol.

i actually got a dell with windows xp media center & tv tuner card but im having trouble finding info about it

My third XP machine was a 2005 Compaq with XP Media Center Edition. I don't believe I ever used the Media center and also don't remember ever having any issues with drivers or software compatibility. I used it as I would any other Computer and actually had a good experience with it, in fact of the 3 systems I had that came with XP the Media Center edition gave me the least issues.

I do not remember the model but my grandma bought me a gateway all in one pc and it had Xp media center. I loved it so much. the pc had a cable tuner and fm radio built in that worked with media center. It also had Napster built in. It charged per mp3 download I believe. I never used it. Had a nice remote aswell.

I built a computer to run media center. It worked decent for a year or two before it died.

Is it possible to use windows xp media centre in 2023

my first hp desktop came with media center

I loved my media centre PCs. Kodi is nice but it's just not the same.

I Have Been Capturing Broadcast TV Since The Mid 2000's! i have Over 30,000 TV Episodes recorded on My Hard Drives All With The Commercials Cut Out and Organized By Series Season And Episode! I use jellyfin Media server to distribute these recordings to My Multiple TV,s Within my Network! Many of The Episodes I Have Were Captured On The Win-TV Capture Card And Using Windows Media Center! i sure Miss The Good Old Windows Media Center Schedule! Now I Have left The SPYWARE/MALWARE That Windows OS Has become! I Currently Use A Version Of LUBUNTU and All Of The GREAT Open Source Software That LINUX Provides!

I feel like I bought this retail in canada and it came with a remote.

best edition ever i had 4 recording channels at a time and was awesome to get the epg working

way ahead of its time, even had a spot at disneyland in the future section

curious if there's a linux distro that serves a similar purpose. i know there are things like xbmc, but most of them aren't very reliable from previous experience.

I remember having windows media center installed on a laptop as a program. But I think it was on windows Vista. Not used it a lot did see the use of it

18 October 2019

Titan AE was so great. Cosmic castaway and Over my Head have stuck with me since childhood.

Interesting to see the beginnings of the Metro UI on Windows XP Media Center

XBMC killed Windows media center.

I forget but wasn't there a gateway media center PC that came with a TV? I could have sworn I saw one back in the day... 3 or 4k price tag back then...

Anyone who might be a little lost: this wildly predates e.g. Spotify, any streaming music.

We basically all used iTunes or Winamp, and would share giant (50GB lol) USB hard drives with our entire music collection on.

You'd end up with mountains of duplicates, different quality rips, shit radio records, accidental porn videos, and loads of other crap xD

Titan AE and Reanimatrix? My man!

for all it's flaws, i miss media center. i have several tv cards and a network attached tuner with 4 tuners that is digital cable compable sitting in a box. media center was awesome for watching tv and recording it when you weren't around.

Great little app that I still use to this day is Tag & Rename. Gets all your track titles, cover art and other info and write it into the MP3 FLAC or whatever file type you have.

I do not think the length of this video is coincidentally

Had Gateway Media Center for my main TV for several years. Was kinda crusty, but with the right tuner card and network connection to my DVD server, was ahead of its time in some ways. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

windows 7 has a media center use that :D

I find it kind of odd that it included DVR capabilities but no ability to record FM or AM radio, even though it was very obviously possible.

I actually have one of those winTV cards somewhere and was always curious what it was used for when I was younger cause I would go around taking computers people threw out and frankenstined a ton of janky computers to try and learn how they worked before i had access to the internet

Media Center 2005 could technically be bought as an OEM version of Windows, but of course without ANY support from Microsoft. Many retailers asked you to purchase it with other PC parts like a motherboard or hard drive so that you could prove you were genuinely building a PC. The package shipped in a cardboard box complete with the license agreement and your sticker was on the back of the manual with instructions on where to affix it on the PC before shipping. But being a budding Home Theater enthusiast on a budget, MCE gave me years of fun rabbit holes to explore including some lesser known/documented things that Media Center could do.

The Hauppage TV cards were also only available as OEM because the drivers were included with MCE. The additional input was done using the onboard header. The guts of the card were the same as the consumer version. The difference was that for the MCE specification they had to include complete s-video and RCA connectors. In comparison, the retail version would rollup the 2x RCA audio jacks into a 3.5mm jack, sometimes the video connectors would also be combined onto a breakout cable of some sort rather than natively on the bracket, and even have a dedicated IR port for the remote control. The MCE version also came with a Media Center remote control and an IR Receiver that connected using a simple USB A -> B cable. The best thing about this? It even had IR blasters and inputs in the box so you could even control an external set-top box using the media center remote. Fun fact - you could also change channels via typing in the keyboard, and Media Center was even clever enough to send that out through the IR blaster! This worked extremelty well, except if your set top box was a slow responder - then media center would "frame" the picture with the EPG of the "new" channel whilst your set-top box is probably still showing the "old" channel, or even half way through changing. Scientic Atlanta boxes from Virgin of this era suffered this especially when I tried this set up. My funniest memory was MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger thinking my TV card was actually a webcam. So unless the content was macrovision protected, I could stream a channel to my friends - just without sound and the aspect ratio was all messed up (probably because it was trying to fit a 576i frame into 320x280!!)

As for recording radio - I had a simple workaround. The Audigy 2 cards that these media center PCs came with had a loopback intput called "What U Hear" which was Creative's clever way of enabling you to literally record what you heard, regardless of how the sound made its way to the sound card. With Hauppage MCE cards, there were no internal audio cables so I'm guessing it had its own driver of sorts.

Speaking of which, the Creative Labs Audigys had that special white pin out to allow OEMs to use Front Panel Headphone/Microphone sockets on the cases. For the rest of us consumers, we had to get a Platinum drive bay and then use the ribbon cable for headphone/microphone connections.

In terms of 3rd party decoders for the default Windows Media DVR format, ATI's Radeon X1600 series and newer cards came with hardware transcoder for many formats. One of the biggest pluses was that it could take a Windows Media DVR format and convert it to MP4, which I was then able to watch on my PSP (because 2006). The encoding process was literally "drag the files to the encoder -> wait -> check output". It was very much a background application with barely any GUI to interact with. Also in terms of quality - the final output was just...OK. Sound was heavily compressed and the video couldn't cope with faster scenes.

Windows MCE 2005's biggest selling point was its support for High Definition TV. My local electronics retailer used one of these MCE 2005 PCs to simply play back High Definition video samples over DVI distributor. Because the UK/PAL regions were way behind the times of ATSC TV standards, the only way we could even get a whiff of HDTV in 2005/2006 via live TV was to subscribe to a steeply priced Satellite or Cable Subscription which then mandated a set top box with....HDMI and of course HDCP. HDTV OTA was not a thing until Freeview HD or Freesat HD was out but by then (circa 2010) most of us would have probably moved onto Windows 7 and it's Media Center. I was pretty bummed that my Media Center rig never got to flex its HDTV muscles.

I also learnt the hard way that when I tried to "force" an install of SP3 onto a Media Center Edition install, I broke it to the point where it got into a state of amnesia. The standard Windows XP screensaver reverted from showing "Media Center Edition" to "Professional" and although the Media Center application remained, it would fail to start telling me unsupported OS. Reinstall from scratch was the only way forward on that one. But, interestingly enough, by "reverting" it back to Professional, the previous capability to join a domain came back. You could start an install of Professional, join the domain, "upgrade" to MCE and remain on the domain. But as soon as you left the domain and rejoined a workgroup, you could not rejoin any domain. So by "breaking it" back to SP3, that was brought back. Although whether you'd want to continue with a frankenstein install of XP on a domain is up for debate!

The 2005 MCE came on 2x CD-ROMs and it would install a vanilla SP2. The setup oddly would ask you to put in the first disc, the second disc, and then back to the first disc. Of course these weren't numbered, so I ended up going in circles for a bit.

However, you also got a "Rollup 2" disc which added the support for the Xbox extenders. Except you couldn't install that bloody disc until you had actually setup Windows XP MCE and THEN installed the pre-requisite .Net Framework. Which meant another trip to Windows Update site! All these little caveats and oddities forced me to learn how to create a slipstreamed MCE install disc which would not only combine the 2x CDs onto one DVD, but then upon first login would automatically install the .Net Framework packages (in the particular order), then the Rollup 2 package, and then reboot so you could finally use it.

Ah, the memories of Windows MCE 2005! Thank you for this trip down memory lane.

Shaolin Soccer and Top Gear, now that's what I'd use this PC back in the day too

I built a media center computer that I used for recording TV shows. I was able to buy a copy of the windows media center OS, bought a tuner card that came with a media center remote and even purchased the wireless media center keyboard that had the small trackball in it. I used that system for about 5 or 6 years.