Is Theater really as good as media center

[Alexh1 3]

I have been using Windows Media Center since Vista. I use mostly live TV using internal tuners and I play MKV files using Media browser.

 

IMO, windows media center live TV functionally is perfect. Reliable, awesome DVR, easy to enable subtitles.

 

The negatives are boring interface, MKV playback has some problems (can lose playback restart point, no fast forward/reverse, need keyboard to enable subtitles).

Also, media center somehow manages to screw up bit streaming as I could never get TrueHD to work although DTS-HD works. Emby works on both of these. Emby eliminates all the codec nonsense which I spent many, many hours trying to figure out on MC just so I could get subtitles.

 

So I did try the free Emby theatre and I subscribed to a guide service.

The Emby Live TV does not show the guide although it does play live tv. I think this is because I have the free version.

The other problem I saw is enabling subtitles in Live TV and MKV playback. It seemed very awkward to me. Hunting around for commonly used settings really kills the experience. In MC it's takes a couple of inputs on the remote for Live TV.

 

 

So, I have no issue with paying a few dollars for Emby but is it close or getting close to the reliability and convenience of MC?

I'm using internal tuners.

 

Thanks

 

P.S. I did try Kodi and I did not like it. It seems cobbled together and I could not get reliable Live TV. Of course I understand that it's free and I know creating something like this is no small undertaking so no offense to the creators.

Edited June 18, 2016 by Alexh1