microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter.hometheaterpc

The group and its era

The home-theatre PC was a simple proposition with complicated plumbing: a computer that sat under the television rather than on a desk, driven by a remote from three metres away, doing the work of a video recorder, a DVD player and a photograph album at once. Microsoft’s version was Windows XP Media Center Edition, first available in North America in October 2002 and never sold as a boxed copy: it came on a finished machine, reaching system builders in certain countries later.

Revisions came at annual intervals and were named a year ahead of themselves: the 2004 edition shipped in September 2003, the 2005 edition in October 2004, with a final update rollup in October 2005. After XP the software stopped being an edition of Windows and became a feature of one, included in Vista’s Home Premium and Ultimate and in every Windows 7 edition but Starter and Home Basic. The group’s working span covers the years when Media Center was still a reason to buy a PC.

microsoft.public.* was Microsoft’s own public NNTP hierarchy, run on the company’s news servers and mirrored across the wider feed; it is described on the microsoft.public.excel.programming page, and Microsoft closed the newsgroups in stages during 2010 in favour of web forums.

What was discussed

The dominant genre was diagnostic: a machine, a tuner card, a signal source and a symptom, posted in the hope that someone had met the same combination. Tuner hardware came first, because Media Center spoke only to cards presenting a standardised driver interface, and early versions expected a hardware MPEG-2 encoder on the card itself — so a tuner that worked in a windowed television application might not appear in Media Center at all.

Then the remote. Most systems used an infrared receiver on a USB cable plus an IR blaster: a small emitter taped over the sensor window of a cable or satellite box, through which the PC changed that box’s channels on the recording schedule’s behalf. Blasters that fired at the wrong moment, changed channel twice, or worked until the box’s firmware was updated supplied a steady stream of threads, as did guide data and the ten-foot interface.

Formats were the other constant. Recorded television went into Microsoft’s own container — DVR-MS in the XP and Vista years, WTV from the 2008 TV Pack onward — raising recurring questions about playing recordings elsewhere, converting them, and what could be moved at all when the source carried content protection. Extenders moved the same problems onto the network: the Xbox 360, which gained the function in the October 2005 rollup and shipped with it built in from its launch a month later, put the interface on a second television without a second PC.

American readers had a further ordeal. CableCARD, the separable-security card the FCC had required cable operators to supply, made premium digital cable technically possible on a PC. Vista supported it only on complete OEM systems certified by CableLabs; Windows 7 relaxed that to existing hardware meeting certain requirements. A Media Center PC was a one-way receiver, so video on demand and pay-per-view stayed out of reach; by 2016 retail cards numbered some six hundred thousand against tens of millions in operators’ boxes.

Context

Because television is a national institution, the group was really two conversations sharing an address. North American posters worked with NTSC and ATSC, QAM cable and a set-top box in the loop; European posters worked with analogue systems giving way to DVB-T, and with DVB-S satellite. Media Center gained DVB-T support only in the October 2005 rollup, so European posters had spent the early years on analogue capture or waiting. Guide listings, channel line-ups and the software’s availability varied by country, so answering a question began with establishing where the asker lived.

The enthusiasm ran from roughly 2003 to 2008, and then the premise dissolved. Microsoft disbanded the Media Center development team shortly after Windows 7 shipped in 2009; the software was left out of Windows 8 and sold as an add-on instead, and in May 2015 Microsoft confirmed that Windows Media Center would not continue into Windows 10, which removes it on upgrade. Streaming services, cheap dedicated boxes and televisions with the software built in had made a general-purpose computer an expensive way to fill a screen.

Read from the convergence coverage that treated the merging of monitor and television as a certainty, the archive is a corrective. Convergence did arrive, but inside the television set and inside a cheap appliance rather than inside the living-room PC — and what this group preserves is the list of obstacles, drivers and standards and licences and infrared, that stood between the demonstration and the sitting room.