This is Microsoft's first serious attempt to create a platform for a complete
media center for a home. It combines music playback, DVD playback, still picture
display, live TV, and a personal video recorder. The interface is fairly
intuitive, and all the core functionality is available from an integrated
infrared remote. We only evaluated the DVD player.
This is a unique product because the configuration we tested is only one of
many possible configurations, and the final results will vary based on the
hardware used. Even the software the PC manufacturer uses makes a difference,
because Windows XP Media Center doesn't include a DVD decoder. Instead it relies
on whatever decoder is installed on the machine, though it does integrate it
into the Media Center UI.
For our setup we used an nVidia 4600Ti video card and the NVDVD decoder, which
was developed in-house by nVidia. From our testing, we believe the Ti offers the
best deinterlacing within the nVidia family, and NVDVD 2.22 offers the best
decoding available right now. ATI video cards also do well when using the
Catalyst 2.4 drivers, with the exception of the 9700. As of this writing the video
drivers for the 9700 were not ready for prime time.
The machine we used was provided by the eHome team at Microsoft. The display
drivers we used for testing were version 40.80, which at that time were unsigned
drivers. 41.09 are the most recent drivers available from nVidia. You can also
purchase NVDVD 2.22 directly from the
nVidia website for $39.95.
Deinterlacing
The new nVidia hardware and software is supposedly designed to offer two
features that had been previously unavailable on an HTPC: cadence-based film
mode analysis (instead of flag-based), and motion-adaptive deinterlacing.
Unfortunately, we were unable to see cadence analysis in action. No matter how
we set the drivers and settings, we still got results that clearly pointed to
flag reading.
We did get motion-adaptive deinterlacing working, and it's a great step in
the right direction for handling video content. However, what we saw still
didn't look nearly as good as the best motion-adaptive video deinterlacing in
chips such as the Silicon Image SiI504 or Genesis FLI2200, or even Sony's DRC
chips. The test patterns we used didn't look quite right, as though one field
was dominant and the other recessive. We suspect that the algorithm nVidia is
using uses one field as the primary source for the final frame, and mixes in
some of the other field in order to improve the vertical resolution. But they
appear to not be giving each field an equal share. One field would generally be
dimmer in the final mix, and the other field brighter, as though the temporal
filter coefficients weren't 50/50. In addition, on the Video Essentials Zone
Plate it just wouldn't give us a full-resolution image, even on the film-mode
section. By our standards, that's a fail.
Since we weren't able to get cadence reading working, we had to fail the player
on essentially all the "unusual flag" tests.
The Basics
The interface was smooth and refined, with generally well designed menus and
graphics. Navigating the menus to get to the various functions like DVD playback
was easy. The remote felt very much like a DVD remote, and had most of the
standard buttons. There were some odd exceptions. For example, the remote has
only one menu button, labeled "DVD menu," whereas a DVD player always has two,
labeled "menu" and "top menu." After some experimentation, we found that the
"DVD menu" button corresponds to "top menu," which is the button on a DVD player
that navigates to the topmost menu on the disc. We found this incredibly
annoying, as we're used to using the normal "menu" button to return to the last
menu visited. If you're several levels deep in the menu system, play some video,
realize you've made a mistake, and want to go back to the menu you were just
looking at, Media Center has no way to do that.
In addition, the remote has no "subtitle" button, "audio" button, or "angle"
button. These are all standard DVD buttons, and on some discs, you need to use
them to access features. Media Center has an incredibly convoluted and
non-standard way of selecting subtitles and audio tracks that we are sure would
not work with some discs.
To select a subtitle or audio track, one must navigate to the Media Center
menu, go several menus deep into the options, and then select a subtitle
language from a huge list of essentially every available language that a DVD
could use. To get to German, for example, you have to go through Armenian,
Azerbaijanian, Basque, etc. by pressing a button many many times. You get the
same set huge of languages to choose from no matter what languages are available
on the disc. Who thought this was a good idea? As a method of setting your
"preferred" subtitle language, it makes some sort of sense. As a primary method
of changing subtitles, it's terrible. And what happens if a disc has three or
four "English" audio tracks, as many often do? There isn't any way to
distinguish between them. You can, in most cases, change audio tracks from the
DVD's own menus, but if you're used to starting the movie and hitting the
"audio" button to get to a commentary track or switch to the 5.1 audio, Media
Center doesn't offer that as an option.
The end result is that Media Center feels almost like a standalone DVD
player, but the omissions and deviations from the DVD standards are frustrating.
Still, it's by far the best out-of-box UI for an HTPC that we've ever seen. For
most people, these menu issues will be minor annoyances; the core UI
functionality works fine.
The overall picture quality from the hardware and NVDVD was excellent. Like
other HTPCs, there is no pixel cropping and extremely clean video with almost no
visible ringing or noise. Of course like most video cards, there are no
anti-imaging filters other than basic EMF and RMI because a PC video card must
run at several different scan rates and you can only really design a filter for
one scan rate. The chroma upsampling in nDVD is the best we have seen from any
DVD player.
As a DVD player, Windows XP Media Center (with NVDVD decoder) worked well, in
fact better than any HTPC we've looked at so far. The remote gives you most of
the feel and usability of a standalone player, which has been a sore point for
many people who are uncomfortable with using a PC as a media hub. The
deinterlacing still isn't at the level of the best
standalone players, but it's come leaps and bounds in the last year or so.
