Jay Marcyes

So I have been test driving MCE2005 for about 2 weeks now and I more or less like it, but there are a few nagging glitches(can I call them that?) that keep coming up. First some back history, I watch alot of divx,xvid,mpeg videos, many on my house's network and also captured using my TV tuner card, I wanted an easy way to watch those on the television. This made something like MythTV more of a pipe dream because I didn't want to set up something like samba to access the network. I had an old computer and also an ATI remote wonder, so I set up MCE 2005 and since I don't have a TV tuner card in the computer I used, I only use MCE 2005 to watch videos, not TV.

The problem is MCE 2005 is not very video watching friendly, and this is why...

1. there is no "get to a specific point in the movie" option, so if I stop a movie in the middle, I have to start it over from the very beginning with no way to get back to the previously stopped spot, there should be 2 such ways to do this, the first is to remember where videos stop and ask the user when they start the video again if they would like to start from beginning or the previous stop point. The second involves the progress bar, I know there is that progress bar that comes up when you pause and unpause, but you can't grab it and jump to a specific point in the video...this should be mandatory, as I am getting sick of getting out of MCE 2005 and opening WMP 10 just to jump to the spot in the movie that we stopped at yesterday. I really feel that Microsoft dropped the ball on this, it seems they designed the UI without actually thinking how someone might use it.
2. Is there a way to bring up the progress bar without pausing and unpausing? I can't for the life of me figure out how to do it...so if anyone knows...

I have other little things that are bugging me, but I can't think of them right now, I will periodically update when they come to my mind...As always, since comments aren't working, please email me if you know a way around these problems.

Otherwise, MCE 2005 works great if you watch full videos without stopping, adding folders that are on the network is a breeze, getting around is a little slow, but I blame that on the computer(pentium 3 800 mhz with 448 mb ram) more than MCE 2005...

Little update: it turns out that MythTV has some of these problems also, the videos in its own format seem to have no problems, I would suppose the same thing is true in MCE 2005, but .avi files just seem to be a bit sketchy...

Little update 2: XBMC (xbox Media center) has none of these problems and is about as flawless as something designed for the 10-foot interface can be. If you haven't already, I recommend go out and buying a "this generation" xbox and having it modded.