In Microsoft’s Allchin has final mission of Vista delivery, in the Seattle Times, Jim Allchin, the Windows ‘boss’ repeats several times that, yes, we will ship holiday 06. Now, it’s one thing for him to say we’re going to ship holiday 06, but I’m now running the Windows Vista version of Media Center at home in my living room and we really are close! The release is coming together and the light at the end of the tunnel is definitely getting brighter.

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In, Mister Vista’s Perspective, Business Week interviews JoeB, eHome’s corporate vice president, about what’s coming with Vista. Not much talk about Media Center though.

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One Voice press release, One Voice Announces Industry’s First Voice Enabled DVD Changer Software for MCE 2005 .

This is super cool. When I was at Digital Life back in October I talked to One Voice CEO, Dean Weber, and he demo’d their latest offering. I also told him about the DVD changer announcement and told him to check out our updated SDK which includes some new changer specific APIs. Glad to see they’re taking advantage of this opportunity!

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This is pretty neato. Stream DivX movies to your XBox 360 using MediaCenter (via Ian). It transcodes your DIVX to WMV on the fly.

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Have an Xbox 360 and a MCE? Thinking about setting them up together to get Media Center Extender (MCX) working? Here are some resources:

• Microsoft.com: Setting it Up
• Microsoft.com: XBox 360 Connection video
• Xbox Forums: Media Connectivity

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Dave an XL1 owner has sent me a few emails and I recently checked out his blog. A few posts caught my eye:

• He notes you can get a Sony XL1 PC + Changer for $1850 after rebate at Amazon. Wow, that’s a great deal!
• If you have a XL1 and are having problems playing back DVDs he recommends turning off hard drive power management.
• He also has a nice review of MCE
  

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I got an email from a user who had an issue with their .MPG videos showing up in My Videos on their MCE but not showing up on their MCX. The problem is very likely due to permissions. The easiest way to check if it’s a permission problem is to copy (not move) one of the .MPGs in question into the Shared Video directory and see if it shows up on the MCX.

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I’ve heard reports of connectivity issues between the Sony XL1 system and the XL1 changer. We’re aware of the issues, there appears to be potential problem with sbp2port.sys, the 1394 stack, and we’re examining potential fixes. I’ll let you know if/when a fix becomes available.

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The other day someone wrote me wondering why the couldn’t have be watching the football game in MCE but listening to music from Media Player. I incorrectly assumed it was a Media Center limitation but in Larry Osterman’s blog about Volume control in Vista he explains the changes being made to enable app volume control in Vista, but first starts us off on an audio architecture history leason:

Before Vista, all of the controls available to applications were system-wide – when you changed the volume using the wave volume APIs, you changed the hardware volume, thus effecting all the applications in the system. The problem with this is that for the vast majority of applications, this was exactly the wrong behavior. This behavior was a legacy of the old Windows 3.1 audio architecture, where you could only have one application playing audio at a time. In that situation, there was only one hardware volume, so the behavior made sense.

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CEPRo, Exceptional Innovation, Intel, HP & Microsoft Star in Next Gen Home, has some photos from the Next Gen home at CES where Media Center got a great showing. Hopefully future Next Gen homes are air conditioned :).

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