Channel Browser

I know that some of you are struggling to get your tuners working with the February CTP. If that’s the unfortunate case you likely haven’t seen one of the new features we added; the Channel Browser. If you have, while watching TV try hitting the up or down arrows on your keyboard / remote.

What it enables you to do is discretely browse what’s on and what’s on next while you’re watching either live TV or a recorded TV show.

This may sound odd, but I will never use this feature because I never ‘channel surf’ or watch live tv anymore. But if you do I think this feature is a great addition to our TV experience.

March 11th 2006 Posted to Random

Comments

  1. verns blog
    March 12th, 2006 | 2:39 am

    YES!!!!]

  2. zoran
    March 12th, 2006 | 3:27 am

    I think this is a great addition to MCE. I remember at first (with MCE 2004) I was missing this feature (simply because it was present on my cable company box), then I learned to do without it (using the guide mostly). I remember liking this feature a lot, so this is a great addition.

    Another really neat feature would be to have a way to very quickly turn on and off captionning. I like to use captions (am a non native english speaker), but at times the captions are a complete mess (typically on news), so I bare with them anyhow because they’re such a pain to turn on and off (too many button presses). I’m sure I’m not the only one in this case (I noticed that a lot of my friends do the same).

  3. captain_caveman2k
    March 12th, 2006 | 9:03 am

    That’s a really great feature Matt.

    Having used this on my girlfriends Sky box (For those that don’t know Sky is the UK’s Satalite System) I really missed not being able to do this in MCE and as such it was one of those features on my wish list over at TGB.

    I look forward to Vista MCE but in the mean time is there any chance of it appearing in a MCE2005 update?

  4. SpHeRe31459
    March 12th, 2006 | 8:41 pm

    Yay, I love this feature on my cable box, and have always wanted MCE to have this :-D

  5. captain_caveman2k
    March 13th, 2006 | 7:52 am

    Zoran: I guess it’s a bit off topic but apparrently there is support in MCE 2005 for a button on the remote to toggle captioning on and off. Unfortunately, none of the OEM remotes implement it.

    However, you can use the keyboard shortcut (SHIFT-CTRL C) instead.

    You might like to check Peter Rosser’s blog out for more details:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/peterrosser/archive/2006/02/19/Captioning_Support_Sucks.aspx

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