[svet-am]

Ummm, no, it's Dead. It's being included as an Add-On sure, but it's never going to be developed beyond what it is, in fact it's been degraded backwards a little from the Windows 7 version.

It's a shame XBMC doesn't do PVR like Windows Media Center because it really is elegant and powerful. All this backend stuff the way it's done in XBMC is the reality of the situation but it sure is messy and confusing.

While I hate to admit it, I concur that WMC is more than likely D-E-A-D. It's just a slow painful death just like the Zune had. We (my family) used WMC on a dedicated box for a little over a year and I have to concur that the user experience is hands down the best in the HTPC/PVR market.

That said, the client-server model of MythTV/NextPVR/etc. is the _correct_ way to handle PVR functionality on a network. If WMC supported client-server (don't even get me started on the problems and limitations of "extenders") then I might not have given up on it.

As it is, I'm running MythTV 0.25 on a CentOS backend and I have a few front-ends sprinkled around the house due to this limitation with WMC. The one thing that XBMC cannot do in its current state that I need as a requirement in our setup is on-the-fly decoding/presentation of Closed Captions (see my other thread about this in the MythTV PVR support area). I have three people in my immediate family with varying degrees of hearing loss and the caption support is something that WMC did superbly and made it such a winner with my family.