Media Center Products

What is Media Center 2004?

Windows XP Media Center 2004 is a superset of Windows XP Professional; it contains additional capabilities for Home Entertainment which is not present or not easily possible to achieve (to same level of results) out of the box on other editions of Windows.

These features enable the ability to view digital media on your machine (all pictures, video's and music) via a graphically driven DirectX based user interface. The special part is you are able to do this using a remote control device on your monitor or TV.

Windows Media Center features the ability to record and pause live TV on demand, and allows you to automatically record an entire series of a program with 2 button presses. The recorded TV shows are recorded in a format called dvr-ms (digital video recording MicroSoft) which is fairly similar to the asf file format. The recorded shows are made up of MPEG2 streams and Meta information to store details about the program. Using the correct software such as Sonic's MyDVD product it is possible to record these shows into DVD's which can be used in most set-top DVD players.

Windows Media Center is an OEM product which means it can only be acquired with a new Media Center PC or for development use as part of an MSDN subscription. At this point you cannot legally obtain the Media Center software to build your own Media Center system for home entertainment purposes. This was a conscious decision taken by Microsoft to ensure that users have the best possible experience (so a system will have adequate hardware and support).

Media Center 2004 is available without a Media Center PC from MSDN as part of their operating systems subscription and higher (from $699 US Dollars). This is designed for developers interested in building for Media Center and is actually a violation of the license agreement to use for home use.