Win7 to Win8 Migration Questions

[oldpueblo]

First off, no I'm not interested in your opinions of Win8 I'm just looking for facts. As a desktop/tablet OS I love it, I use it, done. However I have not as of yet switched my Media Center to it. I'd like to know what the growing pains are for that, and also when Win8 properly ships whether or not it will be easy to transfer the schedule to it. I recall trying this a long time ago in 7MC and it appeared to work but I had lots of scheduling oddities afterwards. So basically here are the questions and hopefully this thread will prove useful for those people that like Win8 and would like to give it a shot. Please don't let this devolve into petty opinions.

*I use it only via xbox360 extenders, can anyone confirm that the RP works fine with those? (I think there were some issues with earlier releases)

*It doesn't auto-start apparently, has a workaround been found for that yet?

*Has anything changed regarding the difficulty/quirks associated with migrating your schedule from 7MC to 8MC or to another box?

*Will I be able to play existing content in 8MC or is it like before where you can only watch it on the box/OS instance you recorded it on?

*Is it exactly like 7MC in every way in terms of functionality? If so I may leave it, but it'd be nice to have every system on the network at the same level for easy sharing, maintenance, etc. I have ten PCs so any way I have of making them all the same tends to save me work.

[adam1991]

[petty opinion]
8 isn't released yet; any information you get today may well be completely invalid when 8 ships, or even next week.
[/petty opinion]

[StumpyBloke]

[petty opinion #2]
This ^^^^^
[/petty opinion #2]

Oh and PS: hello, thanks and welcome!

[makryger]

I usually don't agree with adam's "you won't know until it ships!" comments, but i've already seen major incompatibilities between the consumer preview and release preview, so I would personally wait until we have a final product. From what I heard from the consumer preview, there were issues using extenders.

MS has said, however, that there will be very few changes in media center in Windows 8, so I'm not sure if upgrading will be beneficial.

[oldpueblo]

Fair enough. However if it works and works just fine, I can use it till January without having to redo it. I need to redo my 7MC right now, and would rather not do 7MC again and then 8MC in only three months if it ends up working fine.

[malciv]

I just recently installed the W8 Release Preview (4 days ago). So far I only have one issue and its a big one. x264 files no longer stream to my Xbox 360 via WMC. I haven't figured out why yet. The files still play perfectly fine on my PC so I don't think its a missing codec. Besides that I've found that WMC works better on W8 than it did on W7. Playback and navigating menus is smoother now. I have muck less lagginess when streaming to my Xbox. I can pause and stop playback on the first press of the remote. I don't know if it is a common problem but for me with W7 pausing and stopping video on my Xbox was a crapshoot. I'd have to hit the button a half dozen times before anything happened. All-in-all WMC works much better on W8... except for that weird x264 support issue (which is a big problem b/c it affects 30% of my library).

I'm all ears if anyone has some advise on fixing the x264 streaming issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated.