Windows VISTA BETA 2 Media Centre - Very glitchy TV

[gphillips]

Hi

I have spent the weekend playing around with Vista BETA 2 Media Centre (which looks very promising)

However the performance of the Media Centre application is sluggish (Possibly due to the ATI Express 200 onboard card I have not having enough muscle)

Performance on XP media centre is 100% perfect, so I was wondering if anybody else had seen any issues. My main gripe is TV (via black gold freeview card) - It is very glitchy and pretty unwatchable on all channels. Is this due to the decoder, or again, my graphics cards?

I noticed that i didnt need to install ANY decoders to get DVD and TV playback which is goood, but maybe these built in decoders are the problem?

Thanks

[andysubaru]

I was considering using Vista Beta2 so I did a dual boot with my XP MCE but wasnt convinced. Vista runs nicely and I preferred using it to XP but MCE was far to slow between screens to be usable. So I've gone back to XP. I was using an NVTV and a PVR 150 and didnt have any trouble with skipping sound/picture it was just that if you press guide even while not veiwing TV it took a good 15-20 seconds to appear.

Vista RC1 should be out soon and that will be much more stable.

[gphillips]

Ill look forward to RC1 then!

Oddly, although I would describe the performance of Media centre in Vista as sluggish, I really didnt have to wait at all between screens, it was just the animation / transition was sluggish.

TV was terrible though. DId you install any kind of decoder or codecs, or just use the built in ones?

[andysubaru]

I just used purevideo, didnt bother trying any divx or anything, had given up by then!! Thought Aero was quite cool though

[Gillykid]

Reports of sluggish performance are well documented, as is the fact that this will simply been an inbetween version between the old version and the 2007/8 edition (http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_beta2_03.asp)

Lets hope more is done to speed this up before final release.

[Embarker]

i installed this when it first came out and must admit that i re-installing mce 2005 now.

It is just too slow - i had to drop 2gb of ram in to get it "USABLE" and found that my 600gt pci card only scores a 1, so may rebuild the pc once it's out officially.

Rgds

Dangerous Dave