CNET, Movielink signs up with Blinkx:

Video-on-demand service Movielink said Monday that it has struck a deal with Blinkx, a desktop video search engine. Through the deal, Movielink will allow Blinkx users to search for film titles, watch movie trailers and rent downloadable feature-length movies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Doesn’t sound too interesting for Movielink (a MCE partner), but Blinkx has an interesting service, Blinkx TV which allows you to search TV stations and radio stations for phrases and watch the clips where they show up.

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Charlie Kindel, MCE Controller 1.0.4 Released:

MCE Controller allows the Media Center application of Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) to be integrated into an advanced control system by enabling programmatic control of the user interface via a TCP/IP connection.

To put it simply, MCE Controller, allows you to simulate a press of any button on the MCE IR remote control by sending a text command to a TCP/IP port on the MCE machine.

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Thomas Hawk, My Interview With Microsoft’s Media Center Bloggers

Thomas interviews Charlie, Sean, and I.

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How does the Media Center Extender choose between a wired and wireless network?

If when you bring the device out of standby it finds a wired link it will use it. If it doesn’t it will load the preferred wireless network. Thereby favouring the wired link.

However if you’re connected wirelessly and plug in a wired link it will continue to use the wireless until you come out of standby again at which point it will switch to the wired one.

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Dell introduces it’s first laptop with Media Center 2005 (via Engadget):

• Starting price of $2,749 at 8.6 pounds
• 17-inch TrueLifeTM widescreen display.
• Powered with NVIDIA’s never-before-seen 256MB GeForceTM Go 6800 Ultra graphics card,

No tuner though…

For more info see the above press release link and this Anand Tech article, GeForce Go 6800 Ultra: Powering the Dell Inspirion XPS Gen 2.

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I recently saw a demo of a cool software program named, eTivo:

EtiVo is a solution for people who want to archive their TiVo Recordings. It makes use of existing hacks and software to extract shows, place them on the local hard drive and re-encode them into WMV.

Translation: This is an app that pulls video content off your Tivo and enables you to consume it with a Media Center!

Actually it does way more than that but that’s my perceived one sentence description. For instance it also has the capability to suck content off a Tivo and then farm out the encoding of the content to an encoding farm (because we all have lots of spare machines laying around) and then aggregates the results. It is also very extensible and addins are being written such as AccTivo which will sync your content to a laptop. You can also access the archive of your media over the web.

Apparently it would also be easy to write an addin so that eTivo could use Media Center as a content source and you could then leverage it’s (possibly distrbuted) auto-transcoding features to archive your content. You could then also use AccTivo to sync that content to your laptop for when you’re on the go. If you’re looking for a MCE hack project this would be a great one.

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Remote Record for Media Center official release.

Schedule TV recordings for your MCE over the web.

Update: Phillip Torrone has lots of photos of the app on his Make blog/

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Xtras.Net’s XPMCE 2005 Hardware Kit:

We’ve collected all the specialty hardware you need to turn practically any modern PC into a full-fledged Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and we are bundling them for your convenience!

I know how hard it is to go shopping for MCE compatible hardware so it is great to see someone taking the guess and leg work out of the process.

They also have this offer, Buy MSDN Universal, Get a FREE
Windows XP Media Center 2005
Hardware Kit

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We have a new KB article that I alluded to yesterday.

Microsoft.com, “The DVD may be in use by another application or it is copy-protected” error message when you try to play a DVD in Windows XP Media Center:

This problem may occur if the following conditions are true:

• You are trying to play a DVD that has protected content.
• A high-definition television set is connected to your computer by using a component video cable.
• Your television is set to a resolution of 720p or 1080i.

My take on this is that you shouldn’t be using component :). For the best experience you should be using a DVI connection.

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Today is my one year anniversary at Microsoft (I forgot the candy but will bring it tomorrow). Since today is going to be a crazy twelve hour long day (gotta love those 6-9pm meetings) I’ll reflect on my year tomorrow :) Friday (I now have a 6-9pm tomorrow night too).

Update: I have a pound of Reese’s Pieces outside of my office (if you can find my office :))

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