I went through this when I built a Win7 HTPC perhaps 5 or 6 years ago. I was so happy to no longer have to use Connect360 on my xbox 360 to stream transcoded video from my Mac Pro (that I had to power on to run the whole thing). Finally I'd be able to just play files directly from my NAS into the endless world of Windows media support. No more transcoding from whatever stupid codec/container/disaster the 'scene' is using these days. It will Just Work because all of these people use Windows and it plays everything, right?
Nope. Unmitigated disaster. Same thing, navigating endless spy/mal/adware laden sites to download CCCP codec packages and plug things together, every time I installed one thing I found another thing that didn't work right. I have some weird Jockersoft thing to force some other application to keep running and restart if it fails, and even though I no longer use whatever that thing was, I can't uninstall the goddamned jockersoft thing to save my life.
Windows Media Center itself was actually a joy, though, I really enjoyed how well it worked for the things it could do out of the box which were far fewer than I had been led to believe.
I also realized that a decade+ of using OS X had left me unprepared to navigate the latest online threats in the world of not-entirely-legitimate download sites for Windows utilities. It got really bad while I was away.
Nope. Unmitigated disaster. Same thing, navigating endless spy/mal/adware laden sites to download CCCP codec packages and plug things together, every time I installed one thing I found another thing that didn't work right. I have some weird Jockersoft thing to force some other application to keep running and restart if it fails, and even though I no longer use whatever that thing was, I can't uninstall the goddamned jockersoft thing to save my life.
Windows Media Center itself was actually a joy, though, I really enjoyed how well it worked for the things it could do out of the box which were far fewer than I had been led to believe.
I also realized that a decade+ of using OS X had left me unprepared to navigate the latest online threats in the world of not-entirely-legitimate download sites for Windows utilities. It got really bad while I was away.