With the cable card on the way next year anyone looking at adding these to your installs? I have been playing with one and have gone to every professional level training that I could for the last year. While not everyone is a theater buff, most everyone has a lot of inaccessible digital media that this not stored, backed up, and not being seen or heard on their best TV in the house. Secondly it's definatly not being seen on secondary TV's. While HP. Niveus, Stack9, and etc. claim to have solid platforms the reports of problems on the net from MCE users is just plain scary from a installers stand point. Maybe it's because most users have a standard type office PC with tons of other software and applications going on with that unit. Most professionals that I have networked are installing the MCE in the living room gets used for that and nothing else. Most of the time even the content it on a NAS or etc. and not in the living room hard drive. ISF has even put their name on a couple of units. I could go on and on, but I am excited and cautious about the future of the MCE units from a installer’s standpoint. All comments would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

There has been a lot on this recently. Use the search, you will find a lot of info.

I have been keeping up on all the threads, but I was looking for some fresh information. Everything leans toward the doom and gloom of the problems of having a pc in the theater. If you take a look at the Niveus K2 and the Life/Ware offering as a control system either things are really getting better on the MCE front or alot of capital investment is going down the tubes.

Most of these threads and thier posts are based upon real world experience. If your conclusion from these posts is doom and gloom, then there just may be a reason for that. If you are looking for bright shiny answers contrary to issues that have been brought up here, then you might want to stick to the sales jargon from the manufacturers. Plain fact is, there has been a lot of improvement, but even more to go before any MCE will be worthy of being in a rack and being considered reliable.

Not to pick on just WinMCE, but any HTPC based product is going to generate more support calls to the integrator, and require more user training by the integrator, than compared to something simple like a flat panel display installation.
Add to that the fact that the integrator will be making 1/4 of the margins compared to most other products they are selling.
I have no doubt those without an understanding of their operating cost will dive right into this, but others will wait until there is a sustainable business model.

A lot of R&D going down the drain, simply because Msoft should have native fixes for many of the issues in 2006. Already with rollup 2, installers tell me they used to have to reboot once a week, some haven't rebooted for the month or so since Rollup was rolled out.

cover story of CE Pro mentions one dealer's experience. In fact, there are three profiles i nthat issue about dealers installing MCEs for a living -- not a glorified look at the product, includes both challenges and opportunities.
[Link: ce-pro.com]

The cover dealer also presented a case-study during the full-day media-center boot camp at EHX. Said his biggest 4-MCE whole-house install is still going strong. Biggest trouble today is not reliability but video -- hard to match video cards with video displays. You'll want to find a handful of good combos and stick with them!

Anyway, we'll have another Media Center Boot Camp at EHX Spring. The fall training sold out pretty early. [Link: ehxweb.com]

Lots of tricks for the trade. Beauty of MCE is that there are so many developers creating new (in many cases free) options for the platform. Value-add of installer is that you have to try out these features before offering to clients to make sure they're stable. Never before have I seen such an opportunity for recurring revenue in this industry.