Using Vista as a Media Center.

During the summer of 2007, I decided to try and upgrade my home theater PC from Windows XP MCE to Windows Vista Home Ultimate, to give the newfangled operating system a try. I figured that perhaps, I might get a few new cool features, and stay current, and learn something in the proces..

I'm generally very conservative when it comes to upgrading my OS -- I *never* upgrade Microsoft operating systems in-place. Rather, I always install the new OS on a second disk, and then when I'm happy with it, I just make the second disk the primary disk when it comes to booting. This allows me to always fall back to the old OS if the new upgrade doesn't go smoothly.

The first thing I did when getting my copy of Vista Home Premium edition was open the box, and to my dismay, discover that it only came with a 32-bit version of the OS (in hindsight, there may be a good reason for this, more on that later). So I ordered the 64-bit version for the extra $20.00 from Microsoft.

I proceeded to install a 64-bit operating system on my trusty home theater PC. Installation was easy at first. Just install it and go. Then, I tried to get my devices to work in the new OS. Well, the Hauppauge PVR-150 card worked out of the box, bonus. I then tried to get my HDTV card, a fusion-5 Lite from DVICO, rolling. No dice. That card will *never* get a 64-bit driver from it because DVICO, the company, decided they don't want to go through the effort. So, no HDTV unless I upgraded to a new HDTV card.

Then I tried to play some music. I went and bought a new version of the G-Force visualization software that I like, which was support to support Vista. Not 64-bit, to my chagrin.

At this point, I just gave up and installed 32-bit vista due to bad compatibility with 64-bit media center for plugins, and lack of support for devices in 64-bit driver-land.

Vista 32-bit has full support for my visualization plugin, G-Force, as well as my HDTV card (only because you can use the old XP drivers for a lot of hardware in 32-bit vista).

However, I'm still seeing issues. Video playback was extremely jerky for regular TV (fine for DVD and HDTV though) when navigating menus. Turns out that the root cause of this is pathetic driver support from NVidia (see next section). NVidia is really blowing it with their driver quality in Vista. If you're going to build a computer for running Vista, stay as far away from NVidia as you can, and try an ATI/AMD card -- it can't possibly be as bad as NVidia's Vista story.

I'm also seeing a strange audio stutter 20 seconds prior to the end of each song played -- but only when the visualization is running. I haven't been able to debug this problem yet, it's quite annoying.

The driver situation for NVidia graphics cards running on Vista is atrocious. I cannot barely believe how bad it is.

After struggling to get my 6600 and 6600 GT, and 7600 cards to play back regular TV without terrible choppiness (ironically, HDTV playback was smooth without issue), I eventually reverted to a driver released in March 2007 to get things working acceptably.

It appears that with subsequent driver releases, NVidia has made 480i (regular TV) playback progressively more broken.

If they're trying to get me to upgrade by making my video card performance worse and worse over time, they are rapidly convincing me to upgrade, but to an ATI/AMD card (and to never, ever buy a product from NVidia) given the pathetic state of their driver support. It really shows a complete lack of care about making sure that simple (480i TV) playback work, while they try and make their 3D performance better. Their priorities are completely opposite to someone trying to use their computer to watch TV. Very sad.

While the new interface in Vista Media Center interface is very slick, it's not worth the pain of struggling with the atrocious driver situation for NVidia video cards. Don't upgrade to vista if you have an NVidia video card. If you build a machine to run vista, be sure to avoid NVidia.

If you have an ATI video card, vista is pretty cool, and might be worth your time. Overall, though, it's a very large effort to get it working smoothly. There are a surprising number of problems still hanging around, which is very dissapointing and shows a real execution blunder from Microsoft, and in particular, NVidia.