Besides this being a market Microsoft has yet to trend upon, Microsoft’s PVR emulation operating system has so far gone over well. To start Microsoft has made serious changes to the way it’s selling this new operating system, it can only be purchased already installed on a system that has been approved by Microsoft. So far Microsoft has only approved 6 manufacturers. The other thing Microsoft has done is mandate the use of a tuner card that uses on board mpeg-2 decoding of which only two are avalable at this time. By enforcing these restrictions Microsoft has no one to blame if the machine crashes or doesn’t work correctly. This new mind set isn’t unlike apple, who only allows approved hardware manufactures to make components. I personally believe this is the best thing Microsoft can do to ensure the new operating system goes over well. An in depth review can be seen here from
anandtech.com
