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TV Software: Gates' Guys don't know how to do that either!
Electronics | Jan 7, 05
I have two systems that run Windows Media Center. So far in their short life (about 7 months for one, 3 months for the other) they have managed to screw up much more often than all of the physical TV tape recorders that I have had over the last couple of decades. This isn't an impressive record.
And I can say, without qualification, that if my (hardware) TV recorder screwed up as often as this software, it would either have been returned, tossed out of a second story window, or used as a target to help release my anger and frustration.
I would be happy to tell you what is wrong. But I'm afraid that I can't. I can safely say it has nothing to do with time shifts in the schedule of TV broadcasts. I am willing to accept them, although in an Internet Age really smart software should be able to even deal with them. But, I'm willing to accept that neither the hardware or the software is quite ready for that.
When the screwups that I am talking about occur I am generally left with a little red dot that has an exclamation point in it on my toolbar. If I try to inquire further about the difficulty, the gist of the message that I get is "Something went wrong. You're screwed." Not much more than that. I have no clue what it is that went wrong, or why I have lost some TV hours that I was at least interested enough in to try to record them.
Sometimes it looks like the problem arose because the software couldn't reach the net. Since I have already told it what to record, it is not clear to me that any interaction with the net should be needed. Other than that, all that I can imagine is that the software truly screws up in the sense that it has memory leaks or other problems that cause it to eventually fail after being 'on' for some time.
All I can say is that this whole mess makes me lust after TiVo or some other nice hardware solution. The software just ain't up to it.
Posted by david.ness (Permalink)
