CE Pro, Sony’s MCE-based Digital Living System: Right Product, Wrong Channel. Apparently the XL1 will only be available at retail and won’t be availble through Sony’s Custom Integration sales market line.

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Wow, blogging about MCE is getting really trendy.

David Fleischman, a Media Center project manager, now has a blog Tales of Windows Media Center Project Management. I worked closely with David on RU2. Frequently he would come by my office brandishing a golf club ensuring we were on track to ship on time. Thankfully we did! :)

He was also one of the three at Digital Life and may or may not have had a Flirtini at Pop Burger.

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Peter Rosser, a software design engineer on the Media Center TV team has a blog.

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On Friday, we launched Media Center Update Rollup 2. With the rollup you can now connect a DVD changer/jukebox to MCE. For devices such as the Sony XL1 and the PowerFile R200DL this support is plug and play. For other devices, if they implement the MediumChanger interface and install the appropriate driver they will also work with Media Center. Or if you don’t have a changer you can enable this functionality for locally stored DVDs (more on that later). So what does the feature look like?

Assuming we recognize your changer, we change the Play DVD item on the Media Center start menu to My DVDs:

Once you have a few discs loaded into the changer (on the current changers it takes about 1 minute to scan each disc inserted) My DVDs looks like this:

It looks and behaves very much like the other MCE galleries:

• Pivots on the left
• Context menu for each item
• Triple tap support

Here’s what the context menu looks like:

If you click through to a movie you get the Movie Info page:

You get information like, the director, cast, rating, genre, theatrical release year, synopsis and larger cover art.

If you need to edit the title, because it’s wrong, or we were unable to identify the disc, click ‘Edit Title’:

If you go back up to the My DVDs gallery, or to More Programs you can access Manage Discs which gives you a view of all the optical media in your changer enabling you to eject it or load it.

Upcoming posts on the changer:

• How to display locally stored DVDs in My DVDs with rich metadata
• My DVDs as a platform for software developers
• Where are we going with My DVDs in Vista

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There’s a new article up on the Microsoft Expert Zone, Connect an A/V receiver to your Media Center PC:

There are two key elements to a successful Home Theater PC environment: audio and video. This article focuses on the audio side of things. It explains how to connect your Media Center PC to your audio/video (A/V) receiver. Detailed information is provided about the process of connecting your Media Center PC to your receiver for three different speaker configuration types

The article was written by Nishant, the tester for the My DVDs feature in Rollup 2. If you have any feedback on the article, let me know, Nishant’s office is just a few doors down from mine.

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