Wow, was Digital Life 2005 ever busy!

Here are some photos from Saturday showing how busy the Microsoft booth was:

There certainly was a lot of excitement around XBox 360 and Media Center. Here’s a photo of the living room we had setup with a big screen TV connected to a XBox 360 that we were demo’ing the XBox 360 MCE Extender on:

In addition to the living room setup, we had a theatre setup were they were showing demo’s of MCE and XBox 360. Lucky members of the audience even got to play the 360. We also had six MCE’s setup that people could come by and play it. This is were I spent four to five hours each day answering questions.

While at the show I spoke to three different types of show attendees. Those who knew nothing about Media Center, those who knew about it or possibly just bought it and wanted to know more, and hardcore hobbyist/industry folks. Everyone asked lots of great questions.

I really wish we had a set top box connected to a MCE connected to a TV to show people since we got so many questions about how to connect the three. Fortunately our new marketing site answers this question, Media Center and your set-top box.

I also wish we would have had a variety of MCE form factors on display . Fortunately we could point people over to any number of booths that were also display MCE like HP, Intel, One Voice,…

Surprisinly, I got absolutely no questions about Apple’s Front Row announcement. Though Tivo came up a number of times.

Were you at Digital Life 2005, what were your impressions or highlights?

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Aaron Stebner is the setup guru on our team and has a post on How to get help for Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 setup issues.

I’ve been running the update for a few months now without any problems but I have seen a few isolated reports of problems, so if that’s you please contact Aaron.

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If you have, or are thinking of a front panel display for your Media Center, check out Media Center Magic | Front View. It supports many of the LCDs and VFDs in existing cases, is customizable and supports plugins.

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Version 2.0 of Windows Media Connect is available as of late last week if you have digital media player devices at home (i.e. the Roku).

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Thomas, I was having drinks with Joe Belfiore and Dave Mendlen tonight celebrating the release of Rollup 2 and someone let drop that a Hotmail Media Center app was going to be available next week. Vicious rumor at the Soho 323 club? Or fact? We’ll have to wait and see :).

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I can’t have Sean scoop me on my own feature… If you don’t have a changer you can enable the ‘My DVDs’ functionality with the following reg key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings]
“ShowGallery”=”Gallery”

But there’s a lot more to it then just turning on this reg key… I’ll post more once I get a breather here in NYC.

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Round up of MCE Rollup 2 news.

Microsoft Monitor, Windows Media Center Rolls Up:

Generally, I was dissatisfied with how Media Center PCs were sold during my mock shopping expeditions.

I completely agree and I know from talking and meeting with our retail team that this is a hard problem to solve involving OEMs, retailers and other parnters. The good news is that we are engaged and are working at improving our retail prescence.

Paul Thurrott’s review:

For now, existing XP Media Center Edition 2005 users have a wonderful and free update that gives them new capabilities and better stability and performance. And potential Media Center PC buyers no longer have any reason to hold out. Either way, UR2 will give you the best possible PC-based DVR and digital media experience available today. Highly recommended.

Charlie corrects a few inaccuraries from Paul’s review.

Ian Dixon, Media Center Show #28. I’m on and chat about Update Rollup 2.

Thomas Hawk is a hard customer to please:

It looks like we are going to have to wait until Vista to get the really good stuff.

:)

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We got a new microsoft.com/mediacenter home page today that I think does a much better job than our old one. But if you have suggestions on how we can improve it, please let us (me) know.

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Niveus press release, Niveus Media unveils the Niveus Disc Changer to support full DVD Library functionality on the award-winning Niveus Media Center:

Niveus Media, Inc., manufacturer of media entertainment devices for the high-end audio/video market, is excited to announce its newest digital home solution, the Niveus Disc Changer. With support for over a thousand DVD discs, the Niveus Disc Changer paired with an award-winning Niveus Media Center running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with Update Rollup 2, enables the �My DVDs� feature within the Windows Media Center interface.

Looks like it’s called The Ice Vault 200:

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What’s new in Update Rollup 2?

• XBox 360 Extender support. This has been talked about a lot already. In short, full fidelity, HDTV, Extender remoting to all XBox 360s.
• DVD Changer. This was my pet feature for Emerald and you’re going to get sick of hearing about it shortly. But needless to say, we now have built in support for DVD changers in MCE. Expect to see four different offerings this fall all which will support up to 200 discs (though in theory we support an arbitrary number of discs). Also, while some changers will come bundled with a PC, there will be changers available that you can add to your existing MCE system. And I know Thomas has already panned this feature, but it’s the logical legal ‘bridge tha gap’ solution between now and the time by which we get secure managed copy, and/or true HDTV VOD. We also have a way of emulating DVD changer functionality for those of you without changers; I’ll post details later this weekend.
• Away Mode. Turns off your MCE while still allowing you to record and stream to Extenders.
• Burn HDTV to DVD, burn from network shares. This is my officemate Ben’s pet feature.
• 4 tuners - 2 ATSC, 2 NTSC. For all you who need to record four shows at once.
• Non-linear zoom mode
• Optimization. A new setting that restarts critical MCE processes every day.
• Lots and lots of bugs fixes. I’ll post more about the bugs we fixed in the upcoming weeks

Sorry, no CableCard, and yes, it’s free!

Other news:

• 4 Million MCE shipped since launch
• 20 new countries, 11 new languages
• More than 2 million since May

• 43% of PCs sold at retail in August were MCE
• Lots of people are shipping MCE - over 130 OEMs, 7000 system builders

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