I upgraded (or downgraded as some might consider) my Media Portal HTPC to XP Media Center Edition about two weeks ago. I've really enjoyed using Media Portal, but I'm gonna try Media Center out for a while. I was using the MCE skin for Media Portal, and was using my Logitech 680 remote using Media Portal's support for MCE remotes, so I figured that I could try out the software I was trying so hard to imitate.

I think MCE's UI is a lot more polished. You give up a few things when you create a skinnable UI like Media Portal has. The other thing that I really like is the ability to configure the app with the remote. Sometimes I want to watch a movie on a new fileshare. Before, I'd have to remote desktop in and map a drive and add it to a configuration. Now I just get a list of all the file shares on my network and select it.

I've been very happy with it so far. I was a bit frustrated after two days of attempting to get some directshow filters working for some odd movie formats, but now everything seems to be working great and I've not had to remote desktop in to the machine to fix anything. Usually, I like tweaking on my computers, but with this HTPC project, I've gotten to the point where I just want it to reliably work without any weekly tweaking.  I'm not quite sure what's wrong with me, I guess I'm getting lazy in my old age.

Crossposted from dmihalik.com