Jessica,
We have one major annoyance (feature) with MCE 2005 that really takes away from our enjoyment of watching TV that has been fixed in Vista. Due to this we want to upgrade so I downloaded Microsoft's Vista Upgrade Advisor and checked out our primary HTPC. Our current system is put together with some of the best HTPC components (not necessarily the absolute latest technology though) and all components were purchased within the past 2 years.
Vista Advisor said that my HTPC system is fully compatible with Vista so I bought Vista Home Premium.
Now that I've been doing some more preparation, downloading drivers, etc. I came upon a serious issue. nVidia states that Soundstorm and the entire nForce 2 chipset is not supported with Vista and no drivers will ever become available.
What is Microsoft's position on this? I purchased Microsoft's Vista operating system based on advice from Microsoft - yet it turns out my motherboard and entire system is actually not supported.
Ouch, that sucks.
I can't really speak for Microsoft's position; the Upgrade Advisor isn't part of Media Center (I don't even know what team that is that owns it).
I think you should probably call Microsoft's support line and make a complaint; at least they'll know how to pass on the information that Upgrade Advisor gave you bad advice.
JessZahn: Ouch, that sucks. I can't really speak for Microsoft's position; the Upgrade Advisor isn't part of Media Center (I don't even know what team that is that owns it). I think you should probably call Microsoft's support line and make a complaint; at least they'll know how to pass on the information that Upgrade Advisor gave you bad advice.
Could you check into it for me please? I suspect that Microsoft may actually consider that nForce 2 based motherboards are functional with Vista, but nVidia clearly doesn't consider them functional with Vista.
My understanding is that Vista includes some low performance, generic drivers that support basic functionality with nForce 2 motherboards (with substantially reduced performance) with the exception to the Soundstorm Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding (Dolby Digital Live) and the built in nVidia network port.
From what I've read, it seems like I can probably still use the Marvell Gigabit LAN port and if I buy a new sound card with Dolby Digital Live I can have the use of SPDIF with 5.1 audio again. At the same time, I've been reading about lots of problems and performance issues with many nForce 2 motherboards and with nVidia not supporting us I can see this turning into a nightmare.
One thing I don't understand is why Microsoft doesn't require hardware manufacturers (especially the larger, more critical ones) to provide driver support for a period of time, including upgrades of operating systems - say 5 years or something.
The nForce 2 chipset is one of the most popular chipsets out there. There are likely 100's of thousands of computers running them and there are manufacturers still selling motherboards using them, including ASUS. With nVidia dropping support, they are forcing the customer to either upgrade their entire system and buy a new motherboard and video card ($$$ for nVidia) but the customers who choose not to will struggle with a poorly functional Vista, or not upgrade (-$$$ for Microsoft).
Take a look at my sig. You can see our HTPC is not a low end, obsolete system (sure some of the components stopped being manufactured in the last 15 months or so - but it isn't so old it shouldn't be supported IMO). If you were to compare the performance and features of my system to many of the systems being sold today you'd find it has overall better gaming performance with the latest games, better video playback performance with the latest formats (except possibly HD-DVD and Blue Ray that truely high end systems can play), better sound capabilities (Dolby Digital Live, digital audio output, etc.), high performance SATA RAID hard drive support (600GB Recorded TV RAID), Gigabit network performance, etc., etc. Even the CPU's processing power is up there with many of the current systems.
All of the components in my system are even still covered by the manufacturers 3 year minimum warranty.
JessZahn:Like I said, your issue isn't with Media Center. I'm sorry, but I can't help this time.
I understand your position, but I do consider this a Media Center issue. Please read on (hopefully I can explain my position...).
Up until some time in 2006 the nForce 2 with Soundstorm chipset was considered by many to be the best HTPC/Media Center chipset available because of the 10 foot user friendly Dolby Digital output. Due to this, many enthusiasts building custom Media Center HTPCs specifically selected high end (and expensive) motherboards using this chipset - even though lesser HTPC capable, but newer chipset based motherboards were also available at the time (late 2005 was when I built this one).
As a result there is a higher percentage of dedicated Media Center systems running this type of motherboard.
Essentially what Soundstorm enabled was keyboard/mouse free truly premium digital audio when hooked up to a high end audio receiver (the way Media Center would be used in a dedicated home theater environment). With Soundstorm, if a AC3/DD5.1 or DTS video was played, the digital stream is directly sent to the audio receiver. If a WMV HD or other 5.1 channel audio video was played, the audio is automatically digitally encoded to DD5.1 and again digitally sent to the audio receiver. Similarly if a 5.1 audio video game was played, again the audio is encoded to DD5.1 and output.
Until very recently, no other audio card/motherboard audio was able to do this (and I haven't heard of any doing it as well). In order to listen to 6 channel audio within WMV HD or other 5.1 video, the user had to exit Media Center, disable SPDIF output, enable 6 channel analog audio, and then go to the audio receiver and switch it over to a 6 channel input (and typically only high end receivers even have this). To then listen to Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS 5.1 within a DVD, the user again had to exit Media Center, enable SPDIF output, and switch the audio receiver to a digital input. For a dedicated Media Center system this was highly undesirable and that is why nForce 2 with Soundstorm motherboards were so desirable (you can sit at the 10 foot interface with only a remote in hand and the audio always worked perfectly with the audio receiver only set to a digital input).
So Media Center and its 10 foot interface in a home theater environment created the need for Soundstorm and now - even with new nForce 2 motherboards with Soundstorm still being sold today, Vista does not support Soundstorm.
Vista Media Center not supporting Soundstorm significantly takes away from the entire 10 foot, user friendly, plug and play, concept that makes Media Center superior to competing software.
Microsofts position on the nForce 2 is that Vista's included generic drivers do support it (which is why the advisor says my system is supported). The one thing they do not support is Soundstorm Dolby Digital encoding. The people who are most affected by this by far are Media Center customers (the general population can use 2 channel audio drivers) and that is why this is more of a Media Center issue.
Thank you for listening.
I totally understand where you are coming from. The bigger issue is this, With XP Media Center, it was only supposed to be sold on an actual Media Center machine purchased from a vendor, unless this has changed?
The upgrade advisor was not created for Media Center machines, and therefore your issue is with the upgrade advisor not Media Center. I can understand where Jessica is coming from in that her team doesn't support the advisor tool, nor does Microsoft support Media Center on a PC that was not sold specifically as a Media Center PC, unless that changed at some point.
As far as forcing a hardware manufacturer to provide drivers, I'm not even sure how Microsoft would approach that. Do you really want to go the Mac/Apple route where you can only buy certain machines and equipment?
-D
Well...we didn't make it all that difficult in recent releases for system builders to get the OS, right.
The trouble is, we never supported the system builder community well (as I'm sure tons of you can relate).
I can ask a couple people here to read this thread and see if they know anyone to talk to about this, but I wouldn't even know where to begin. MS is a HUGE company. I have ownership over my little piece of the world, but I don't know a ton about what goes on in other worlds.
And as for forcing IHVs to provide drivers, we can and do work with them and encourage them to support hardware on various platforms. Sometimes we can come to an agreement; sometimes we can't.
Alternatively, maybe you can help me with a work around for the one and only real issue that is driving us to upgrade to Vista's Media Center.
The problem is the annoying "series limit" messages that keep popping up on the screen. I've spoken with Microsoft tech support, various Microsoft employees, and had this registered as an enhancement request. Aaron Stebner, years ago, looked at getting this fixed for us in MCE 2005, but unfortunately the fix was only implemented in Vista.
Here is how this plays out:
- We use Media Center for all of our TV watching. Since it is a dedicated system that everyone in the family shares, there are 70 series programmed to record and "only" 600 GB of hard drive storage dedicated for Recorded TV.
- In order to control the amount of hard drive space used and ensure the system is available to record "important" shows, most of the series are configured to record a maximum of 2 and keep the recordings until they are watched.
- This works perfectly in that once 2 are recorded they simply sit there and Media Center doesn't record any more of that series. All of the shows that we like to watch are available any time we want to watch one.
- Unfortunately this means typically 70 multiplied by the number of times that particular series is available per day we see a pop-up message stating that "the series limit has been reached", offering to enter the scheduled recordings area. Each time we have to right click the remote and select cancel. Literally this occurs 100's of times per day (every 1/2 hour there is a barrage of popups that need to be canceled). Many of the childrens shows are on 10's of times per day - some even as many as 30 times (I've counted them) on multiple channels.
- I've tried manually specifying certain series to record only one episode per day, etc. - but unfortunately if Media Center didn't already record one that day it still pops up the message each and every time the show is on all day long.
- I've tried manually specifying certain series are to be recorded on certain channels and at certain times, but this inevitably ends up with shows not being recorded (as show times vary over time this becomes a show management nightmare).
- I've tried specifying that the all series should keep only the latest recordings and this gets rid of the messages. Unfortunately this means that Media Center is literally recording 24 hours per day and only the higher priority shows get recorded at all (over and over and over...).
- I've tried specifying that the system should keep as many as possible, but this quickly fills up the entire hard drive and then stops recording everything with even more popups every 1/2 hour.
- I simply cannot think of any reason for this message to pop up at all. Of course the series limit is reached on a regular basis - to limit the number of recordings is what it is for.
Basically this popup message totally takes away from the dedicated Media Center experience and I simply can't see any way to get around it.
Being able to specify how many to keep and to keep them until watched is absolutely perfect - if only we could get rid of the popup messages.
accident:while your complete usage might be for media center, media center is just software running on windows. this is a vista device support issue. considering soundstorm was canned before nforce3 came out, not shocking to me.. and isn't that chipset now 3-4 years old? thats forever in the computer industry.I'm seeing reports from some simple web searches that people can get the dolby out working again just but using the latest realtek ac97 drivers.I'm also seeing people who have taken the XP drivers for nforce2, used winrar to extract the contents of the exe and then use the update driver to install the xp version of the driver to get 5.1 working again..these were web searches, not sure how much I trust the sources but I also use a lot of nforce2 and I was using the xp drivers in the beta.. some quirks but did work.. (well 2 channel worked) never tried surround..
I've been reading through the forums the past few evenings and it does look like there is hope. Yes the chipset came out 3-4 years ago (late 04 I believe it first came out), but that means that it was a common chipset throughout 2005 which is only 2 years ago.
I've been doing this (trying to build the ultimate Media Center HTPC that the entire family can use including my 5 year old, 9 year old, wife, baby sitter, in-laws and my mother and father visiting, etc.) long enough to realize that absolute system stability and no keyboard/mouse interaction is an extremely high priority (this is my second HTPC - I built the first one in 01/02 with 3rd party software). As such I am very leary about using hacks and work arounds for drivers.
I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable at this point to simply perform an upgrade to the OS and install Vista over top of MCE 2005 (even with a backup).
I actually just purchased a new hard drive yesterday so I can have some flexibility and try a Vista install without affecting the currently on-line system. I've also been pricing out new complete systems, but it is a very big price tag to get rid of the popup messages.
JessZahn: Well...we didn't make it all that difficult in recent releases for system builders to get the OS, right. The trouble is, we never supported the system builder community well (as I'm sure tons of you can relate). I can ask a couple people here to read this thread and see if they know anyone to talk to about this, but I wouldn't even know where to begin. MS is a HUGE company. I have ownership over my little piece of the world, but I don't know a ton about what goes on in other worlds. And as for forcing IHVs to provide drivers, we can and do work with them and encourage them to support hardware on various platforms. Sometimes we can come to an agreement; sometimes we can't.
Thank you for looking into this a little more.
BTW, I found an online poll regarding Vista nForce 2 support. For some reason it doesn't show up with Google and I don't recall how I stumbled accross it.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nvidia/signatures.html
The A7N8X was released in 2002:
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Mzk0
It is almost five years old. If you bought this rig in the last two years it was obsolete before it was delivered.
When you ran the upgrade adviser it probaly said something like:
"After installing Windows Vista, this device will require an updated driver. To obtain the latest driver, go to the device manufacturer's website or contact you retailer."
I don't mean to be harsh but at that point folks need to make sure the hardware provider will support their bits. The app is not psychic and hardware vendors rarely telegraph their support plans that far in advance.
The last nForce2 driver update was almost three years ago.
It is totally abandon ware. Which sucks, as it is a great HTPC platform.
iank: The A7N8X was released in 2002: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Mzk0 It is almost five years old. If you bought this rig in the last two years it was obsolete before it was delivered. When you ran the upgrade adviser it probaly said something like: "After installing Windows Vista, this device will require an updated driver. To obtain the latest driver, go to the device manufacturer's website or contact you retailer." I don't mean to be harsh but at that point folks need to make sure the hardware provider will support their bits. The app is not psychic and hardware vendors rarely telegraph their support plans that far in advance. The last nForce2 driver update was almost three years ago. It is totally abandon ware. Which sucks, as it is a great HTPC platform.
The upgrade advisor didn't say anything at all about requiring updated drivers. It was a little confusing though as it stated everything was supported, including the nvidia audio, but there was something about an issue with the nvidia audio software (but right after that nvidia audio drivers being fully suppored and included with Vista). In reality the only drivers officially available for Vista and my motherboard are included with Vista.
Edit: See next post about dates (I'm not up on the actual release dates, but being announced as available to reviewers in December 2002 hardly means it could be purchased in Canada (and the rest of the world) in 2002. This motherboard was definitely sold around here in volume through 2004. My processor (bought at the same time) wasn't even available until mid-2004 in Canada (announced as available at the very end of 2003). Even if the bulk of the boards were sold in 03/04, that's still only 3-4 years ago today (as already mentioned). Also keep in mind 2006 was not long ago and I believe Vista was available in late 2006 to OEMs for resale and early 2007 for retail.)
No matter how you look at it, there were huge numbers of nForce 2 motherboards sold within the last 3-4 years (many within 2 years) of Vista being released and to me that isn't old enough to be end of life for the consumer - especially for a Media Center system. Intel for example supports their motherboards virtually indefinitely. Right now my daughter is playing video games on her 9 year old Dell Opteron. Its running Media Center 2005 and is 100% fully functional, with fully supported Intel drivers for the motherboard (chipset, network port, USB ports, PCI bus, audio, etc.). The OS installation was a truly plug and play install and then I downloaded the latest chipset drivers from the Intel website. The only thing I added to make it compliant with Media Center itself was to add a $42 PCI GF5500 video card (for DirectX 9 support) and a $30 Microsoft MCE remote. In our basement we also have an 9 year old Celeron 600 system with an ABIT BX6 motherboard (Intel chipset again). It too is running Media Center (hooked up only to a 34" TV), again running 100% flawlessly with a $42 PCI GF5500 video card and a $30 remote. Both of these systems are absolutely 100% stable, with all motherboard hardware fully functional with XP and MCE 2005. We watch TV and DVDs on them all the time without even so much as a hickup in the video flow. I also wouldn't be surprised if I could go ahead and install Vista on them too without any trouble.
I have to say I was absolutely floored when I found out that nVidia dropped support for systems that were only sold a few years ago. I never expected this to be an issue in any way - especially with my experience with Intel chipset based motherboards.
I guess I really screwed up when I spec'd my HTPC. My video card was also a serious disappointment. I selected the brand new (this was very much state of the art at the time) BFG 6800 OC AGP along with the ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe and XP 3200+. I even sent e-mails to BFG and nvidia asking for their recommendation for the best video card that would support WMV HD decoding and they replied with the 6800 as having the best GPU decoding for this. As you all probably know, nvidia kept saying "the next driver will support WMV HD" and this went on for about a year until they said "the 6800 AGP does not support WMV HD decoding". $600+ for a WMV HD decoding video card that never worked. It wasn't until a few months ago when I upgraded to the ATI X1950Pro 512MB AGP that I was finally able to watch all of those WMV HDs that we bought (there actually was a period of time when it did sortof work with software decoding, but after WMP11 it stopped working again until the X1950Pro).
Sorry I'm getting off topic, but as you can see there have been a number of issues with functionality and support of certain hardware as it applies to building a Media Center system.
iank: The A7N8X was released in 2002: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Mzk0 It is totally abandon ware. Which sucks, as it is a great HTPC platform.
Actually I just did a little web searching for reviews of my motherboard. My motherboard, which is the A7N8X-E Deluxe (not the original A7N8X), looks like it was actually released to reviewers in Jan-April, 2004 (not very late 2002/2003). I don't believe the chipset was available at all until late 2003 as this board uses the newer NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 + MCP-T chipset, not the original nForce 2.
As such it would have only been available mid-late 2004 in Canada and my purchasing it in early 2005 would have made it not all that old at the time (something like 4-6 months since first put on the shelves). This makes much more sense as the motherboard was in stock at many local hardware retailers (I remember calling around for prices).
So if we say late 2004 would have been a reasonable time for someone to purchase or build a system with this particular motherboard in Canada, it was only a little over 2 years old when Vista was released. Do you consider 2 years too old to be supported through to the next version of the operating system.
When was Vista first spec'd to hardare manufacturers so they could start working on their drivers? I bet nVidia had the driver specs before my motherboard was even manufactured.