WARNING: Massively geeky post ahead.

Short and sweet: holy monkey biker spit. As trendy as the HTPC is becoming in the hardware world, you'd think someone could write some half-decent software to go along with it. It took me less than a day to put together the hardware and I've spent almost a month getting the software right. I think I have it down though.

Lesson I: XBMC is popular among the open source crowd, and I imagine it was amazing when it was first running on the original XBox. Its automatic grabbing of fan art and the like is nifty, but the interface either obscures that stuff, or fails to provide enough information at a given moment to actually be useful. Ultimately it is clunky and unintuitive. No dice--uninstalled.

Lesson II: iTunes is not designed to be used as an actual media player. It is designed to sell you things. The iPod Touch actually makes a great little media remote. iTunes makes a great storefront, and is utter crap for everything else. Sits mostly unused (except for syncing the iTouch with its two main programs--Air Mouse and iControlAV).

Lesson III: Windows Media Center has a fabulous interface for music. WMC wins, though with several caveats...

Caveat I: Get MP3Tag. The WMC interface is only nice provided your MP3s are fully and appropriately tagged--after trying to do this with iTunes, MediaMonkey, and ID3Tag, I found MP3Tag, which actually worked. It's worth noting that Windows Media Center will inevitably scatter extraneous .jpegs all over your hard drive--but then, so do XBMC and iTunes, though these at least have the decency to keep the files out of your actual music follers.

Caveat II: Get Media Browser. Windows Media Center is worthless for browsing video collections. However, Media Browser is an excellent addition that fills the gap extremely well.

Caveat III: And yet, even Media Browser is worthless without a properly tagged video collection... unfortunately video containers aren't as advanced as MP3 tagging (!?) and so you need an XML solution. Media Center Master does a pretty good job, though requires some tweaking.

Caveat IV: Windows Media Center is not natively skinnable. Fortunately, Media Center Studio goes a long way toward fixing that. It's not a perfect solution, especially when it comes to editing the menu (at least one jury-rigged solution was necessary to get the Media Browser icon where I wanted it). But it mostly gets the job done.

Caveat V: You know patents were intended to encourage progress, right? So why on Earth do I still need stand-alone blu-ray player software? This is madness. For as much as I paid for Windows 7, you'd think Microsoft would just pony up the fee and build blu-ray playback into the mess. Anyway, ArcSoft's Total Media Theater refuses to work at all, and PowerDVD fails to play audio in WMC (though it works fine in WMP!?), so I'll probably go with WinDVD, which is working so far, but in terms of interface PowerDVD was far superior. d-_-b Which finishes the caveats but brings us to...

Lesson IV: The HTPC world is not ready for 64 bits. Seriously. Because getting everything to play back smoothly was like escaping from the fiery depths of hell with a toothpick and a paper plate. I tried going simple--ffdshow, Haali media splitter, DirectVobSub. Everything plays back fine in WMP! But WMC crashes on playback. Come to find out that the 64-bit version of ffdshow verges on the non-functional. Try Shark007's codec pack--MKVs crash WMC. Disable 64-bit ffdshow--now WMC fails to recognize MKVs. Try CCCP, try K-Lite... fixing one problem introduces another, whether it's squashed video streams or multiple audio tracks playing simultaneously or failure of subtitles or subtitles playing in two places on the screen or...

It was finally an install of K-Lite Mega Codec Pack, plus K-Lite 64-Bit Codecs (meticulously choosing any option other than ffdshow in the 64-bit setup), that got everything working all at the same time.

Lesson V: And what about content? MakeMKV gives me easy blu-ray rips, but without compression. HandBrake crashes like crazy until I download the nightly snapshot, which works compression like a champ but doesn't handle the subs I ripped with MakeMKV. No problem, Open Subtitles has my back! Well, that and a decent .SRT shifter.

So now I've got it. Windows Media Center displays my media in an attractive fashion and plays it back when I ask. But the number of plugins I needed to give WMC the functionality it should have straight out of the box, and the pain of getting codecs working with my media collection, and the diversity of programs necessary to convert my physical media into easily-accessed, reasonably sized files... simply boggles. I should be able to do all this with three or four programs, tops.

There are a number of reasons why this isn't so--from the use and misuse of patents and licensing to the very real technical challenges posed by my heavily legacy-encode-laden media library--but I won't discuss them here. I just wanted to let you all know that I am an IT professional and a lawyer, and it took me something like three weeks of concerted effort to arrange my HTPC's software and library layout to my relative satisfaction (top priority is a solution my wife can use without relying on my expertise every time she wants to watch a show or listen to some music).

I think I understand why AppleTV failed. HTPCs are trendy among techies but WMC is nowhere near what it needs to be if PCs are going to replace cable boxes in the living room. Maybe Google can do better?