What do you guys think of MCE 2005?

[jackylad]

Looks fantastic to me. I'm torn between MCE 2005 and Meedio.

I know that you can't customise MCE and there are no open source plugin community, etc etc, but if time and capability is a problem (which it is for most people) do you think that MCE is better in its standard form than Meedio?

As M$ are banging on about multiroom solutions will the overall quality be high end or am I going to end up with a great interface with average quality picture. Am I asking the wrong questions here as is it nothing to do with MCE how good a quality picture you get but in fact down to your hardware. It's just that on an HTPCnew forum which was doing a review of MCE 2005 the guy mentioned that he was disapointed that MCE didn't support FDDShow, and that once you've watched a DVD using that (whatever it is??) you'll never want to use anything else.

Wot do you reckon?

[stewwy]

Chances are that MCE will be is crippled when it comes to copying or using codecs other than wma

Don't know for sure but once you've shelled out for it your stuck with it! at least you can try meedio for free for 15 days

M$ stuff is great for just using ( unless it crashes lol, but it shouldn't now, its just XP with a fancy face ) but cr*p when you want it to do something other than the basics

stewwy

[KraGorn]

FFDSHOW is a techie's wet dream :) .. you can fiddle with it for ages to obtain a better picture than you get from the DVD player software and decoder itself .. some people forget to actually WATCH DVDs, so busy are they twiddling and tweaking. :grin:

I wonder why the writer said MCE doesn't support it. :confused: Windows Media Player won't but that's a brain-dead application anyway, it's up to the DVD software player whether it uses post-processors like FFDSHOW.