Is plenty of alternatives nowadays, Mediaportal, Mythtv, Kodi, NextPVR, DvbLink, Emby, Plex and so on. But IMHO WMC has still a better, cleaner, faster UI than any competitors, although is way less feature packed than other media centers. Anyway hardly it will be replaced by anything from MS, as I said before they started to think to WMC like Apple thinks to FM radio on iPhones: as a treat to paid contents. Apeing Apple proved to be a really bad move in the recent past, but looks like MS still have to learn the lesson.
That is why WMC died. Almost nobody knows what it does, and it costs MS too much money to write & support a program nobody uses. Right now, WMC is mostly used as alternative to renting a cable box or dvr from cable companies or FIOS here in the US. None of those named alternatives can be used with cablecards which is required in the above situation. Yesterday on Windows Weekly, Paul Thurrott was saying that WMC functionality might make its way to XBox One. There is some sort of crowd-sourcing program that might be a replacement for WMC in the future, but that would not be subscription-free as WMC is now.
That's not the point. Right now I'm using Kodi AND WMC, Kodi is great and cand do a lot of things, including running on my three years old Android phone. But is still not clean and mouse friendly as WMC, the same applies to MediaPortal. It's like Windows Mail from vista, it was just a good program to use, no matter if Opera Mail or Thinderbird are better or not. But unlike Windows Mail that can be installed quickly on win 7-10, I'm sure that WMC will be colse to impossible to get it running on Win 10 RTM. After many years (AFAIK) no one has managed to get it running on any windows server, I'm sure the same scenario will be applicable to win 10.
Well WMC is boring, it works as is supposed to. XP MCE was not, in 2004 or so I spent literally days to get it working, and that wasn't boring at all
rip you will not be missed as you where a useless product with tons of better products that are far better
Functionally Windows Media center was not much to look at. The features were pretty blaahhh I mean if you looked at other products it looked like crap.
I started with the great (and unlucky) Showshifter, the ancestor of all mediacenter, and I tested practically everything, until Plex and MB3/Emby, and as I wrote before, while everyting is better featurewise, nothing is really on par with the actual WMC looking at the UI, the ligtness and in part as the reliability. Try to play some fullHD video while doing something of disk intensive on the some machine, do it using Mediaportal, and do it using WMC, the latter will play "silky". The former.... If coupled with dvblink (which is extensive and a genius SW at the same time) WMC can be shared and Kodi/Emby/Plex can be used side by side to WMC letting you to choose the better of each for a definite purpose. Say, you can use Kodi on a linux machine or on an android phone while watching WMC on a windows notebook and any. ServerWmc is a great free (partial) replacement for Dvblink, whit it you can use WMC or Kodi or Emby teather on the "server" machine, but you can't use WMC on client side. The combinations are endless, and although WMC is not mandatory is a nice tile of the puzzle, a tile that I will miss.