well, from the other OS you can use to do the same things and do it for free, MS is getting some decent competition
tomshardware.com had a decent comparison awhile back, so have a few other websites
its probably easier to set up winXP MCE than linux at first, but linux has way more options and once setup it just plain works.........and works quite well, solves the security and file format problems for certain
Mom and Pop enduser arent gonna have an easy time setting it up on linux though I can attest to that, ive got years of experience with it and took a few days working on it off and on to get it the way I wanted.........but there's also tons of choices to make and lots of apps to try. In the end I ended up using a few scripts that I wrote and used MPlayer which has become the standard for video in many OS's not just linux..........take a peek inside many video apps for windows and you will likely see stuff from the linux world like MEncoder and FFMPEG, just compiled to run on windows. I tried some windows stuff recently only to find this out........dvdauthoring tools, encoders, ripping tools, etc etc.......almost all had .dll's based on code for linux written in C with the cygwin .dll included !!!
WinXP MCE has already gotten you stuck with the proprietary formats you have to deal with in video files, this stuff is native to linux these days cause it has to be.........I havent found any files lately that MPlayer wont play or re-encode into something else. Classic case of a company screwing itself with proprietary apps and formats. Once setup, upgrades or patches to linux are usually quite easy as well, and sometimes in windows they are too, sometimes they arent.......precompiled binaries setup for the lowest common denominator has issues. Windows still has the advantage with drivers for hardware, but linux has been making big gains in that area as of late, still wise to do some searching and checking before buying anything that's for sure.
tomshardware.com had a decent comparison awhile back, so have a few other websites
its probably easier to set up winXP MCE than linux at first, but linux has way more options and once setup it just plain works.........and works quite well, solves the security and file format problems for certain
Mom and Pop enduser arent gonna have an easy time setting it up on linux though I can attest to that, ive got years of experience with it and took a few days working on it off and on to get it the way I wanted.........but there's also tons of choices to make and lots of apps to try. In the end I ended up using a few scripts that I wrote and used MPlayer which has become the standard for video in many OS's not just linux..........take a peek inside many video apps for windows and you will likely see stuff from the linux world like MEncoder and FFMPEG, just compiled to run on windows. I tried some windows stuff recently only to find this out........dvdauthoring tools, encoders, ripping tools, etc etc.......almost all had .dll's based on code for linux written in C with the cygwin .dll included !!!
WinXP MCE has already gotten you stuck with the proprietary formats you have to deal with in video files, this stuff is native to linux these days cause it has to be.........I havent found any files lately that MPlayer wont play or re-encode into something else. Classic case of a company screwing itself with proprietary apps and formats. Once setup, upgrades or patches to linux are usually quite easy as well, and sometimes in windows they are too, sometimes they arent.......precompiled binaries setup for the lowest common denominator has issues. Windows still has the advantage with drivers for hardware, but linux has been making big gains in that area as of late, still wise to do some searching and checking before buying anything that's for sure.