As some have noticed, there isn’t a specific offering of Windows 7 Media Center Edition. This is because it’s not necessary being that the Windows Media Center software is already bundled into Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate editions.

Many of you – including yours truly – remember when the Windows Media Player went from version 10 to 11 and seriously screwed things up when playing DVD movies. Some had no problems, but the rest of us did. Whether it was flickering, an odd resizing of widescreen aspect ratio movies (which is just about all of them) on playback, or whatever it was, WMP 11 more or less destroyed the ease of DVD playback that WMP 10 had.

On top of that it seemed every other DVD player (CyberDVD, WinDVD, etc.) worked, but WMP 11 never could quite get it right.

And let’s not forget that in Windows XP you’re essentially forced to upgrade to WMP 11. If you try that “rollback” to 10, chances of that working correctly aren’t that good. Some make it work, but many cannot.

Windows 7 uses WMP 12. This can be run independently on its own, or you can use it in Windows Media Center. For true television-style playback the Media Center is the better choice.

Media Center and WMP 12 plays back DVDs exactly as they’re supposed to. It works with no hassle. No need for downloading any special codecs or any of that nonsense. Pop in a disc and go.

In the video below I show how Media Center works with a regular DVD disc, but bear in mind that it can be set up to accept a remote control, has Internet TV capability and a whole host of other goodies. This is all included in the Windows 7 editions mentioned above.

It’s nice to have a Windows that doesn’t require all that codec/configuring nonsense just to play a DVD. Truly.

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