Chris worries that we don’t support the small OEMs. His post primarily revolves around CableCard certification, but I’m not an expert in that area so I won’t comment on it, other than to say, I agree with Thomas Hawk. However, he also points to the DVD changer feature as something we aren’t doing a good job of playing with small OEMs with:

The DVD Changers with Update Rollup 2 are a great answer to ripping DVDs, however with only Sony and Niveus in the game we are locked into either having a Sony XL1 or a Niveus Media Center. Powerfile, the marker of both the Niveus and Sony Changers don’t a version retail that will work with Media Center. Then there is that price tag, Niveus sells their Niveus Disc Changer (Ice Vault 200) for $2500 and Sony only sells theirs with a XL1 Digital Living System for $2300.

I’d disagree. While we did closely collaborate with Sony on the development of the XL1 changer what we built can be leveraged by anyone.

For instance here is the information you need to build your own DVD changer and get it to work with Media Center 2005 Update Rollup 2:

• Changer must either be supported by an in-box Windows driver or by an OEM provided driver which implements the Media Changer device class.
• Must expose the drive(s) as standard Windows optical drives.
• The device/drive combination must support the following IOCTLs:
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_GET_ELEMENT_STATUS
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_GET_PARAMETERS
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_GET_PRODUCT_DATA
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_GET_STATUS
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_INITIALIZE_ELEMENT_STATUS
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_MOVE_MEDIUM
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_QUERY_VOLUME_TAGS
• The results from IOCTL_CHANGER_GET_PARAMETERS must indicate the following
  feature flags:

  Features

  • CHANGER_STATUS_NON_VOLATILE
  • CHANGER_POSITION_TO_ELEMENT
  • CHANGER_STORAGE_DRIVE
  • CHANGER_VOLUME_IDENTIFICATION
  • CHANGER_VOLUME_REPLACE

  MoveFromSlot

  • CHANGER_TO_IEPORT
  • CHANGER_TO_DRIVE

  MoveFromIePort

  • CHANGER_TO_SLOT

  MoveFromDrive

  • CHANGER_TO_SLOT

  PositionCapabilities

  • CHANGER_TO_SLOT
  • CHANGER_TO_IEPORT
  • CHANGER_TO_DRIVE

  Also if you want to build applications like Sony’s music CD ripping app you can do so by taking advantage of the changes we made to our SDK with Update Rollup 2. For instance check out MediaChanger Object which enables HTML applications to control the disc changer.

  Properties:

  • DriveDiscData – Gets information about the discs in the drives.
  • IsLocked – Indicates whether the media changer is currently locked by any application.
  • SlotDiscData – Gets information about the discs in slots

  Methods:

  • LoadDisc – Loads the disk in the specified slot into the specified drive.
  • RescanDisc – Causes Media Center to rescan the disc in the specified drive.
  • UnloadDisc – Unloads the disc in the specified drive.

If you have any questions I’d be more than happy to answer them.

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Blueado m5e MCE: The Blueado mini is 4.2 inches tall, just over 7 inches long and 12 inches in depth it’s a perfect addition to your livingroom.

Cute! But a little pricey at $1500. I’m going to wait for that $500 Averatec Media Center announced during the BillG keynote at CES (I’m surprised Averatec doesn’t have any info about this PC on their site).

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