Windows Media Center First Impressions

Here's a quick list of the experiences I had with Media Center on Vista.  These are all based on never using it before and just playing around with it in less than 24 hours.

• The UI is ok.  But there are a lot of options/selections I'd just like to turn off, and I don't see a setting to turn them off.  It still takes me a lot of up-down-sideways movements to get to where I'm going.

• When I start watching something and then jump into settings, the only way I can find to get back to the show I was watching is to jump to the main screen and choose "Now Playing".  This takes time and I wish the remote control would have a button to do this automatically: the "Now Playing" button.  Maybe this is a feature in Media Center that just isn't on my remote.  I need to explore this issue more.

• Watching a show does not allow enough granular fast forwarding and rewinding.  Maybe this is a side-effect of the xvid codec, but I've had much better experiences in other video players.

• Shows don't seem to have a way to keep track of a bookmark of where I leave of.  Maybe there is a plugin for this.

• I am using audio over my graphics card HDMI and when I pause a show and unpause it, I lose a couple seconds of audio.  I assume this is because of the encryption that needs to happen over HDMI.  It's annoying since I have to rewind my show a bit every time I unpause it.  It could be an issue with my receiver, this may be a difficult one to debug.  I'll have to try audio in other applications.

• Everytime I start up Media Center, the first time I select a video, it will not start playing for upwards of 3 minutes.  I haven't been able to narrow down what is happening at the same time.  Possibly, it is when files are being copied to a "watch" directory.  Just another point of frustration right now.  I may need to dig into event logs and/or Media Center logs (do they exist?)

• If you delete the last video in a sub-folder of your Video folders, the interface does not jump you to the next available show.  Instead, it keeps showing you that last video.  Unlike when you delete a video in the main video folder directory, you're immediately updated with the next video to watch.  It would be nice to configure it, so that it jumps you back to a folder with more videos in, since that is the next thing I end up having to do manually now.  Maybe I can write a plugin to do this.  Sounds relatively simple, I wonder if the API allows me to do it though.  More research...