I have found this floating around on a website or two and was wondering if anyone had any further news to add to it.

Fiji, officially known as Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008, has Released! The input from Self Host testers has been invaluable to this product and the team would like to thank each of you for your bug reports and feedback.

As the release team is taking a much needed break, our next focus will be to post the final build onto the Products servers. Please check the newsgroups for updates. Once the build is live, we will notify you.

What website did you read that on?

mabrown:

What website did you read that on?

Australian Media Center board.

-D

Do you have a link? Do you mean www.xpmediacenter.com.au? I never noticed a post like that.

 

Edit: Never mind - found it.

So is this real or a hoax Mike?

Here's the direct link...

http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/community/vista-media-center-software/30579-fiji-has-been-released.html

Hopefully 2+ multi-tuner-type support and high def support will be there.  If it is then it will certainly make me very happy!

All quiet on the western front.

I'd love to have someone tell me I'm wrong but -

A source I cannot disclose but who I believe is an authority told me last Friday that Fiji would be released to manufacturing Monday (14 July 2008). However...

It's an OEM only product.

It's a separate add-on package to Vista.

DVB-S (not S2) HD is only supported in a few countries such as France, Sweden and (I think) Austria.

MS seem to have taken steps to prevent it being simply installed by non-OEMs (i.e. us). I have a copy of the RC0 that many have been beta testing (and which is time-bombed for sometime in August). I tried to install it on a fresh, fully-updated Vista and got "This update is not applicable to your system" (or similar wording). I believe MS has sneaked in an update that prevents installation except by authorised OEMs.

So we're back to the silly situation we had with the original MCE, except MS are much wiser about how good we are at getting around their daft ideas, so we can expect getting/installing this to be much harder.

I wonder why they are doing this? Don't they ever learn?

I'm sticking with DVBViewer for now, together with VMC. At least it supports DiSeq and I can get BBC HD.

Sigh.

RS

Well is it is like the '05 update I had to get from hp maybe I can have the same luck getting it from Dell?

I really hope Mike or some other ehome member can deny this.
If true I can see a whole bunch of verbal tirades heading thier way, i got my ticket for the queue.

It is also being reported on geektonic:

http://www.geektonic.com/2008/07/microsoft-fiji-release-this-week.html

Which funily enough links back here ;-)

If it doesn't have HD support, and doesn't have DirecTV support. It is useless to me.

Not to mention the complete lack of useful features.

Way to go MS, a real advancement in technology. Having us wait for years and letting it only go to OEM's. That's a good way to win the support of your core base of customers.

I own a business installing eHome, you can GUARANTEE that I will not be installing Vista Media Center for any of them, there are tons of other options that allow customers to not have outdated hardware as soon as you decide to release something new.

abuttino:

If it doesn't have HD support, and doesn't have DirecTV support. It is useless to me.

Way to go MS, a real advancement in technology. Having us wait for years and letting it only go to OEM's. That's a good way to win the support of your core base of customers.

I own a business installing eHome, you can GUARANTEE that I will not be installing Vista Media Center for any of them, there are tons of other options that allow customers to not have outdated hardware as soon as you decide to release something new.

A bit of an over-reaction to an unconfirmed rumor, don't you think?

I am a little more upset about the complete lack of support for HD and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD.

It wasn't even mentioned.

I tried to install it on a fresh, fully-updated Vista and got "This update is not applicable to your system" (or similar wording). I believe MS has sneaked in an update that prevents installation except by authorised OEMs.

Are you sure ?
I found a leaked copy from a Russian site (don't know which version this was), and originally got this error message as well.
Then I remembered that I was not running Vista with SP1.
After installing that, it no longer gave that error message and allowed me to install.
Indeed : mixed tuner support (in my case DVB-S and analogue cable, but no DVB-S2 support and no Diseqc either).
I could get BBC HD to show up by first using DVBViewer to switch to Astra2, then quitting it and firing up Mediacenter, and in setup choosing to point at Astra2 (Mediacenter still has no support for Diseqc !!!).
HDTV playback seemed quite smooth, and files were saved in that new fileformat.
I did not see many other useful things (still no automatic aspect ratio detection, for instance).
Also, there was still a 2 tuner limit (I have 2 DVB-S2 cards and an analogue cable tuner).

I'm sticking with DVBViewer for now, together with VMC. At least it supports DiSeq and I can get BBC HD.

Sigh.

RS

This could be a step forward though !
I have not yet tried DVBSBridge with this version, but I assume it should be possible to use a virtual DVB-T tuner with this Mediacenter version, and then tune in to any station.
The only limit that was there up till now was that the fileformat DVR-MS had no support for H264, but with that gone it should be possible to have all channels in Mediacenter, FINALLY !