kahunaburger

Yesteday I went through the process of upgrading our Gateway Entertainment PC (FMC-901X) from MCE2004 (SP1) to MCE2005 (SP2). I was actually surprised that it only took a few hours and that I did not have to revert to the backup I created before starting the upgrade.

All in all I did:
1) install Service Pack 2 (while MCE 2004 was still installed)
2) verified that MCE 2004 was still working
3) installed the upgrade to MCE 2005
4) installed an MCE version of the display driver for the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (before doing that I would always get an error message upon starting MCE which said that my graphics card or driver was not compatible with MCE)
5) used Windows Update to install the update 1 for MCE 2005 (do yourself a favor and install that as soon as you have MCE 2005 installed otherwise you’re going on a wild-goose chase with some of the other problems)
6) reinstalled the latest WinTV drivers from hauppage.com

After doing all that, everything seems to work just fine (if we forget about the LCD display of the Gateway unit for the moment, but that’s only a minor problem).

You’ve probably read about MCE 2005 at other sites already and I’m not going to repeat that, however I did not see the “Movies” feature in any of the other MCE 2005 descriptions (or at least I can’t remember seeing it).
From the “My TV” menu you can get to a new menu entry called “Movies”. When you select that, this is what you’re going to see (partial screenshot only):

Right hand side shows all movies that are currently on all the channels you receive. “On Next” will show you all the movies which are going to start in a little (so you don’t miss anything).
You can drill down and get to details about a movie and can also directly select an actor or a director:

When you do that (as for Dustin above), you see all the movies that the system knows about for this specific actor. This does not necessarily mean that the movies are actually on TV any time soon.

Neat - well done.