Only allowing you to watch live TV without any actual DVR like scheduled recordings makes this pretty poor IMO. You can watch live TV over an antenna with the integrated tuners in any modern TV. Sure you can pause and you get some other minor benefits but that hardly seems to justify the $60 or $80 price tag for a single tuner. Now if it had DVR functionality that would be a whole different story.
So in order to watch TV using and XBOX you pay $60, surely turning off the XBOX and watching the TV it plugged in to is the cheapest option? If you stick a USB stick in the side of the TV most will act as a DVR as well. Do the dev staff and marketing people at MS live on the same planet as real people?
I use a projector, which doesn't have a TV tuner. There are also people with A/V systems that don't support HDMI, and people with TVs that don't have proper audio output, these people are stuck haveing to manually switch a bunch of inputs or use the built-in speakers to watch TV. There people that simply want to use the OneGuide and Kinect to watch TV, and to have it all be integrated properly. TVs do not have HDMI outputs, so there's no other way to do "snap TV" and other Xbox features with the setup you describe.
LOL, and in other news, nobody cares about that crap.
Seriously, I'm rarely if ever at home watching TV live so this is completely useless to me and I'm guessing most of the market as well, total failure. I also give 0 cares about Xbox in general, I don't game a lot but when I do its PC only.
MS needs to wake up and get back to work on Windows Media Center for those of us that want high-end HTPCs. More importantly though they need to imbed it in set top style box with some decent hardware (which should be easy enough these days) so it can hit the market penetration that software is capable of doing.
"Microsoft should not bring out this XBox/Hauppage feature with niche appeal because I don't want it and am too narrow minded to think anyone else might be different. Instead what Microsoft should do is return to something else [WMC+Extenders] even more expensive and with an even more niche appeal because that's what I want".
An expensive add-on aimed a dead paradigm (live TV viewing); if that's how its going to function they should not bring it to market.
As to WMC its only niche because its complicated, expensive, and OEMs completely blew it terms of form factors (tower PC in the living room???), its certainly not niche due to how it functions as its far more powerful than this joke.
Apple has been going after the other side of this market for years with Apple TV, and with constant rumors circling about physical Apple branded TV on the horizon, this is certainly big and lucrative market. MS has everything they need to compete in this market with WMC and the ARM program experience; how long do they really want to neglect this market? WMC is certainly a stagnant product there is no reason it should be, MS has everything they need to go after this market. WMC is already a excellent DVR, all it needs is updated streaming support and to be rolled it into a settop box with a powerful SOC and support for external networked storage and they would have a very successful project.
Oh, and keep it and add-on for full Windows as well so us enthusiasts can keep building our high-end HTPCs.
A dead paradigm? There are a hell of a lot more people watching live TV than using WMC, so if live TV is dead that must make WMC a fossil.
I used WMC once, I had one of the Linksys extenders, it sort of worked but it was far from flawless, very expensive and firmly an "enthusiast" product, it would need a LOT of work to become anything else at this point. An appliance box would be great but I can't see it being cheap enough to compete with streaming catchup services or other PVR products. A DVR server with client boxes at each TV will always be a very, very niche solution.
WMC is "product" live TV viewing as a means of serial video content is a "paradigm" and yeah its pretty much dead. My grandparents watch it live (but they also have Netflix), luddites watch live TV as do poor people with no other means but its pretty much the worst way to consume the content.
The great thing about WMC is that it can do pretty much everything and its quite good at most of it. The DVR functionality is best in class. Steaming is/was quite good as well, the interface to Netflix is very slick and responsive (of course now it has major issues due to lack official support), there is also a 3rd party Amazon app (plugin) that works quite well. All it really needs is official support and to be updated.
Then there is the support for local movie and music content for those enthusiasts that wish to do it that way.
I'm in the same situation. My projector doesn't have a TV tuner, so I currently have an OTA tuner box going into my XB1. I run it through the XB1 because that gives me a schedule grid as well as voice control (which I use frequently). Moving to a built-in solution, with better integration, and the only DVR functionality I ever really used (pause live TV), for an add-on that costs less than a standalone OTA tuner? Sounds like a pretty nice new feature to me!
With this you can keep having your skype harrasments and whatnot open on xbox, seamlessly jump to tv while you are waiting for new game to start in your online xbox-game and whatnot. If TV is secondary function to gaming, this allows you to add OTA-TV to you xbox-experience.
Not everybody is interested, but I can easily see that some people might like it.
exactly. this is pointless, to say the least. You have an xbox plugged into a tv. so you are going to buy a tv tuner for the xbox? I don't think so. Just switch the input on the tv from xbox to the antenna and boom, you have your tv without spending more money on a useless xbox attachment..
Obviously if you could use it as a DVR, this would be insane and a must buy, a great supplement for a Tivo or two. Another reason user replaceable drives are a good thing!
I'm sure I'll by this, even if I'm not certain I'll never use it.
REALLY shocked by what a genuinely cool idea this is. With all the dumb gimmicks these companies do, throwing in support for a cheap digital over the air tuner rocks!
I wonder if we'll ever see network-based tuner support. The only hard part about that is that Microsoft would need the manufacturer's support since network tuners require drivers to interface with the actual hardware.
Microsoft already handles those in Windows Media Center. Actually, they're the **only** software solution that can handle the Copy Once flag. The only thing is that it involves a license, which is rumored to be quite pricey, and I don't know if that license is limited to Windows or whether they'd have to pay more to use it on the Xbox One. The Xbox One does use the Windows kernel for its UI portion.
I love SiliconDust. I agree Microsoft should have partnered with them for a network solution, or at least a dual-tuner solution. It would have been cheaper and more effective.
Regarding that...I think Windows 10 is going to support playing games from your Xbox One streaming to a local Windows 10 PC? If so, then it should be doable to use it to stream live TV too, at least technically.
I hadn't thought of that , but if that works, that makes this cooler still.
I use Windows Media Center as well, but it's definitely not perfect. The biggest problem that I have with it is that it's just not smart with its recording. For example, if you are recording two programs that air back-to-back, WMC will eat into the program if you have any overage set. In other words, to watch the beginning of program 2, you have to watch the end of program 1. The only way to fix this is to set the excess recording to +/-10 minutes, and the negative side effect is that it locks down an extra tuner to do this. There's absolutely no reason why it can't just stream the data from one tuner to two files. It only writes at about 1MB/s while recording!
There are also some annoying bugs that have been around for a while. For example, when you click on Guide and it moves back over to Recorded TV and selects that instead. The only way to fix that is to move up or down first. They also need to make the screen customizable without having to resort to third-party tools. There's just so much garbage on there for most users. It would also be great if we could get it integrated into Modern UI, which I think serves as a great 10-foot UI.
Of course there's no perfect free/$10 DVR (with a free program guide); WMC is just better than the others. The price is certainly right too.
I wish it had a few better features regarding the live buffer and saving it to recordings, but it still works well. If back-to-back programs get cut off it's usually because the station's clock or your computer's clock is slightly off. The default of recording 3 minutes past the end "when possible" works well most of the time.
The problem with Windows Media Center (WMC) is that MS is deprecating it, no feature upgrades or bug fixes in years. WMC is a killer app and MS doesn't even know it. Instead of reinventing the wheel, they should develop wmc extender apps for the Xbox one, Roku box, Apple TV (gasp), Sony PS4 etc. I recently bought a Roku3 which is nice but there's no way I'm cutting the cord. Much slower than my htpc in basic navigation plus I've been using dvr functionality for over a decade I'm not going back now and why should I pay Hulu to watch missed shows when I can record them myself and watch them at my own convenience, commercial free? WMC could easily have hulu.vudu plugins etc in addition to netflix, my two cents.
Then you could grab a cablecard from your cable company and watch live cable tv on your Xbox One. They would definitely need to add DVR functionality for this, which shouldn't be too hard as it has a harddrive and they have existing code in Windows Media Center for it.
I currently use PCI-e version in an HTPC and watch TV in Windows Media Center on a mid-range spec'ed Windows 8.1 PC connected to my TV and Speaker system. Would be nice if I could eliminate that PC and just do everything on the Xbox One.
I don't understand the point of having this when there is no "DVR" or scheduling function. Am I missing something? It doesn't make sense that these features aren't there when the thing essentially runs Windows Media Center. I could stick this exact tuner into a Windows 8.x PC, pay $10 for the Microsoft Windows MCP upgrade, and have a full blown DVR.
I suppose they're not doing it because it's a single-tuner chip in the HVR-955Q, in which case, that is a huge oversight since dual tuner chips probably cost little more.
I mean don't get me wrong, features are cool, but it's kind of half-assed in classic Microsoft fashion.
I can simply plug an OTA antenna into my TV so why would I want this device other than for snapping?
If "cable cutters" like me are going to watch TV through their Xbox's, MS needs to offer a guide, DVR functionality, and the ability to share my recorded programming over my network and beyond.
Because they don't offer anything like this, I have TabloTV and a Roku box running the TabloTV app connected to the same TV as my Xbox. If there were a TabloTV app I could run on the Xbox, I could at least ditch the Roku box connected to that TV.
Not everybody has a display device that has a built-in TV tuner. Anybody using a projector, for example, or a computer monitor, or an older TV. In my case, I use a projector, so no built-in tuner.
Microsoft does offer a guide, quite a good one, the "OneGuide". Right now I'm using a small OTA tuner box to watch TV through my XB1, and it does get a guide... although it has no way of knowing which channels my antenna picks up, so instead it shows all channels that I might be able to receive. Integrated support that can detect which stations are within range would be a better experience.
It will also provide basic DVR functionality, namely pausing live TV. My current OTA box doesn't do that, so that's also welcome. It's also the only DVR functionality I ever really used when I used to have digital cable with a DVR.
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33 Comments
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kpb321 - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Only allowing you to watch live TV without any actual DVR like scheduled recordings makes this pretty poor IMO. You can watch live TV over an antenna with the integrated tuners in any modern TV. Sure you can pause and you get some other minor benefits but that hardly seems to justify the $60 or $80 price tag for a single tuner. Now if it had DVR functionality that would be a whole different story.medi03 - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
Actually, many modern TVs allow you to have DVR functionality too. (although quite restrictive, thank's to all the HDCP shit)coburn_c - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Cooler than just buying Hauppauge, a staple in the PC world that deserves some love.lorribot - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
So in order to watch TV using and XBOX you pay $60, surely turning off the XBOX and watching the TV it plugged in to is the cheapest option? If you stick a USB stick in the side of the TV most will act as a DVR as well.Do the dev staff and marketing people at MS live on the same planet as real people?
auralcircuitry - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I use a projector, which doesn't have a TV tuner. There are also people with A/V systems that don't support HDMI, and people with TVs that don't have proper audio output, these people are stuck haveing to manually switch a bunch of inputs or use the built-in speakers to watch TV. There people that simply want to use the OneGuide and Kinect to watch TV, and to have it all be integrated properly. TVs do not have HDMI outputs, so there's no other way to do "snap TV" and other Xbox features with the setup you describe.Operandi - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
LOL, and in other news, nobody cares about that crap.Seriously, I'm rarely if ever at home watching TV live so this is completely useless to me and I'm guessing most of the market as well, total failure. I also give 0 cares about Xbox in general, I don't game a lot but when I do its PC only.
MS needs to wake up and get back to work on Windows Media Center for those of us that want high-end HTPCs. More importantly though they need to imbed it in set top style box with some decent hardware (which should be easy enough these days) so it can hit the market penetration that software is capable of doing.
kingpotnoodle - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
What you have basically just said there is:"Microsoft should not bring out this XBox/Hauppage feature with niche appeal because I don't want it and am too narrow minded to think anyone else might be different. Instead what Microsoft should do is return to something else [WMC+Extenders] even more expensive and with an even more niche appeal because that's what I want".
Do you not see the contradiction there?
Operandi - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
An expensive add-on aimed a dead paradigm (live TV viewing); if that's how its going to function they should not bring it to market.As to WMC its only niche because its complicated, expensive, and OEMs completely blew it terms of form factors (tower PC in the living room???), its certainly not niche due to how it functions as its far more powerful than this joke.
Apple has been going after the other side of this market for years with Apple TV, and with constant rumors circling about physical Apple branded TV on the horizon, this is certainly big and lucrative market. MS has everything they need to compete in this market with WMC and the ARM program experience; how long do they really want to neglect this market? WMC is certainly a stagnant product there is no reason it should be, MS has everything they need to go after this market. WMC is already a excellent DVR, all it needs is updated streaming support and to be rolled it into a settop box with a powerful SOC and support for external networked storage and they would have a very successful project.
Oh, and keep it and add-on for full Windows as well so us enthusiasts can keep building our high-end HTPCs.
kingpotnoodle - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
A dead paradigm? There are a hell of a lot more people watching live TV than using WMC, so if live TV is dead that must make WMC a fossil.I used WMC once, I had one of the Linksys extenders, it sort of worked but it was far from flawless, very expensive and firmly an "enthusiast" product, it would need a LOT of work to become anything else at this point. An appliance box would be great but I can't see it being cheap enough to compete with streaming catchup services or other PVR products. A DVR server with client boxes at each TV will always be a very, very niche solution.
Operandi - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link
WMC is "product" live TV viewing as a means of serial video content is a "paradigm" and yeah its pretty much dead. My grandparents watch it live (but they also have Netflix), luddites watch live TV as do poor people with no other means but its pretty much the worst way to consume the content.The great thing about WMC is that it can do pretty much everything and its quite good at most of it. The DVR functionality is best in class. Steaming is/was quite good as well, the interface to Netflix is very slick and responsive (of course now it has major issues due to lack official support), there is also a 3rd party Amazon app (plugin) that works quite well. All it really needs is official support and to be updated.
Then there is the support for local movie and music content for those enthusiasts that wish to do it that way.
BMNify - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
LOL, and in other news, nobody cares about you and your dead/zombified Windows Media Center.Guspaz - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link
I'm in the same situation. My projector doesn't have a TV tuner, so I currently have an OTA tuner box going into my XB1. I run it through the XB1 because that gives me a schedule grid as well as voice control (which I use frequently). Moving to a built-in solution, with better integration, and the only DVR functionality I ever really used (pause live TV), for an add-on that costs less than a standalone OTA tuner? Sounds like a pretty nice new feature to me!zepi - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
With this you can keep having your skype harrasments and whatnot open on xbox, seamlessly jump to tv while you are waiting for new game to start in your online xbox-game and whatnot. If TV is secondary function to gaming, this allows you to add OTA-TV to you xbox-experience.Not everybody is interested, but I can easily see that some people might like it.
Margalus - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
exactly. this is pointless, to say the least. You have an xbox plugged into a tv. so you are going to buy a tv tuner for the xbox? I don't think so. Just switch the input on the tv from xbox to the antenna and boom, you have your tv without spending more money on a useless xbox attachment..Wolfpup - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Wow, I like this! I'm honestly really shocked.Obviously if you could use it as a DVR, this would be insane and a must buy, a great supplement for a Tivo or two. Another reason user replaceable drives are a good thing!
I'm sure I'll by this, even if I'm not certain I'll never use it.
REALLY shocked by what a genuinely cool idea this is. With all the dumb gimmicks these companies do, throwing in support for a cheap digital over the air tuner rocks!
Pissedoffyouth - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
Yeah! Go team go!Aikouka - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
I wonder if we'll ever see network-based tuner support. The only hard part about that is that Microsoft would need the manufacturer's support since network tuners require drivers to interface with the actual hardware.Elixer - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
They could have made a deal with SiliconDust to have a network based tuner.Really odd that it don't offer PVR support, maybe since the HD's aren't big enough, or some other dumb reason (DRM)?
coburn_c - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
Massive DRM problems. Broadcast Flag makes.. well broadcast... the easiest to work with.Aikouka - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
Microsoft already handles those in Windows Media Center. Actually, they're the **only** software solution that can handle the Copy Once flag. The only thing is that it involves a license, which is rumored to be quite pricey, and I don't know if that license is limited to Windows or whether they'd have to pay more to use it on the Xbox One. The Xbox One does use the Windows kernel for its UI portion.Samus - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
I love SiliconDust. I agree Microsoft should have partnered with them for a network solution, or at least a dual-tuner solution. It would have been cheaper and more effective.kingpotnoodle - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
You mean like Sat>IP or the Elgato Netstream devices? That should be easy really.Aikouka - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
I was thinking more like the Ceton InfiniTV or the SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime.Wolfpup - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
Regarding that...I think Windows 10 is going to support playing games from your Xbox One streaming to a local Windows 10 PC? If so, then it should be doable to use it to stream live TV too, at least technically.I hadn't thought of that , but if that works, that makes this cooler still.
DCide - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
Not sure what makes Windows Media Center "complicated," or why it's being spoken of in the past tense.Anyhow, I use it every day. I've also got my retired, non-technical parents using it (and liking it!).
I think it's the least complicated no-monthly-cost DVR available.
Aikouka - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
I use Windows Media Center as well, but it's definitely not perfect. The biggest problem that I have with it is that it's just not smart with its recording. For example, if you are recording two programs that air back-to-back, WMC will eat into the program if you have any overage set. In other words, to watch the beginning of program 2, you have to watch the end of program 1. The only way to fix this is to set the excess recording to +/-10 minutes, and the negative side effect is that it locks down an extra tuner to do this. There's absolutely no reason why it can't just stream the data from one tuner to two files. It only writes at about 1MB/s while recording!There are also some annoying bugs that have been around for a while. For example, when you click on Guide and it moves back over to Recorded TV and selects that instead. The only way to fix that is to move up or down first. They also need to make the screen customizable without having to resort to third-party tools. There's just so much garbage on there for most users. It would also be great if we could get it integrated into Modern UI, which I think serves as a great 10-foot UI.
DCide - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
Of course there's no perfect free/$10 DVR (with a free program guide); WMC is just better than the others. The price is certainly right too.I wish it had a few better features regarding the live buffer and saving it to recordings, but it still works well. If back-to-back programs get cut off it's usually because the station's clock or your computer's clock is slightly off. The default of recording 3 minutes past the end "when possible" works well most of the time.
And 4 tuners is usually enough for OTA recording.
jamawass - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
The problem with Windows Media Center (WMC) is that MS is deprecating it, no feature upgrades or bug fixes in years. WMC is a killer app and MS doesn't even know it. Instead of reinventing the wheel, they should develop wmc extender apps for the Xbox one, Roku box, Apple TV (gasp), Sony PS4 etc.I recently bought a Roku3 which is nice but there's no way I'm cutting the cord. Much slower than my htpc in basic navigation plus I've been using dvr functionality for over a decade I'm not going back now and why should I pay Hulu to watch missed shows when I can record them myself and watch them at my own convenience, commercial free?
WMC could easily have hulu.vudu plugins etc in addition to netflix, my two cents.
Wolfpup - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
Yeah, I'm really disappointed if they're not going to continue developing it/supporting it.khaydin - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
What they should do is make the Xbox One compatible with this:http://cetoncorp.com/products/infinitv-6-ethernet/
Then you could grab a cablecard from your cable company and watch live cable tv on your Xbox One. They would definitely need to add DVR functionality for this, which shouldn't be too hard as it has a harddrive and they have existing code in Windows Media Center for it.
I currently use PCI-e version in an HTPC and watch TV in Windows Media Center on a mid-range spec'ed Windows 8.1 PC connected to my TV and Speaker system. Would be nice if I could eliminate that PC and just do everything on the Xbox One.
Samus - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
I don't understand the point of having this when there is no "DVR" or scheduling function. Am I missing something? It doesn't make sense that these features aren't there when the thing essentially runs Windows Media Center. I could stick this exact tuner into a Windows 8.x PC, pay $10 for the Microsoft Windows MCP upgrade, and have a full blown DVR.I suppose they're not doing it because it's a single-tuner chip in the HVR-955Q, in which case, that is a huge oversight since dual tuner chips probably cost little more.
I mean don't get me wrong, features are cool, but it's kind of half-assed in classic Microsoft fashion.
Ubercake - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
I can simply plug an OTA antenna into my TV so why would I want this device other than for snapping?If "cable cutters" like me are going to watch TV through their Xbox's, MS needs to offer a guide, DVR functionality, and the ability to share my recorded programming over my network and beyond.
Because they don't offer anything like this, I have TabloTV and a Roku box running the TabloTV app connected to the same TV as my Xbox. If there were a TabloTV app I could run on the Xbox, I could at least ditch the Roku box connected to that TV.
Guspaz - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link
Not everybody has a display device that has a built-in TV tuner. Anybody using a projector, for example, or a computer monitor, or an older TV. In my case, I use a projector, so no built-in tuner.Microsoft does offer a guide, quite a good one, the "OneGuide". Right now I'm using a small OTA tuner box to watch TV through my XB1, and it does get a guide... although it has no way of knowing which channels my antenna picks up, so instead it shows all channels that I might be able to receive. Integrated support that can detect which stations are within range would be a better experience.
It will also provide basic DVR functionality, namely pausing live TV. My current OTA box doesn't do that, so that's also welcome. It's also the only DVR functionality I ever really used when I used to have digital cable with a DVR.