Need a way to manage your DVR-MS on your desktop/at 2′? Check out recorded tv manager:

Recorded TV Manager provides a familiar and convenient user interface to manage your collection of television programs recorded by Microsoft Media Center Edition (*.dvr-ms files.) Recorded TV Manager takes advantage of the fact that Media Center is a computer with the familiar “2-foot interface” to provide an alternative to the remote control and Media Center experience for managing a large and constantly changing collection of recorded television programs.

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Media Centers NOT ready for primetime:

I got a Media Center four months ago. I love it. And hate it.

Thanks for the great feedback. I’ve forwarded parts of it onto the relevant people on the Media Center team. A few thoughts:

I have to restart the Media Center every second day. It’s very unstable.

Did you build this Media Center yourself or did you buy it pre-built from the store? I can only speak from my experience, and that is that my HP DEC Z555 rarely requires rebooting (and it’s using the ‘OEM image’ and not my own private install). It definitely requires less rebooting than the Toshiba notebook I use everyday. Though I do know that many other people have not been as fortunate in their experiences.

The guide. It sucks. Yes, it’s on the love-list too. But it could be so much better. Lot’s of channels are missing

We’re working hard to improve our ‘EPG’ data. If you’re having issues try posting in our newsgroup where our EPG data people hang out.

Somehow the Media Center doesn’t understand that I don’t want the same program 15 times, even if National Geographic airs it at different times every time.

This sounds like a bug, it should record the same show every time. There might be a problem here with the EPG where it doesn’t mark the same shows as actually being the same. Probably best to provide us with feedback on this in the newsgroup.

I sent most of our digital pictures into the Media Center. It’s nice being able to watch pictures from the couch, with friends of family. But it’s like iPhoto 1998:

Unfortunately we won’t have support for either EXIF or ratings in Windows Vista. I’d also suspect that the majority of Media Center users do their photo acquisition and triage at their desktop where it is much easier to perform functions like rotate, crop, etc. Media Center is simply not optimized around doing these tasks for large amounts of content.

Why isn’t there a way to move a recorded movie from recorded content to movies?

I’m confused about this one since there isn’t a movie library in MCE 2005?

If I record a great movie, and there’s 12 minutes of advertising in front of it, it should be possible to tell the Media Center that every time I watch that movie it should start at 12:08, not 0:00.

That’d sure be nice but we might risk annoying the broadcasters and cable operators who rely on that advertising revenue. Fortunately Media Center is a platform and someone has written a tool to edit DVR-MS files. Check out D-Cut.

My main point is: Media Center is a great product that is too hard to use, and has too many errors. I’m sure the Media Center in Vista will be much better. But until then, I would not recommend people buying a Media Center unless there are at least one person around that is geeky enough to google for solutions, and tweaking the system when it behaves badly.

I too hope that Windows Vista will be much better, and we’re working hard to ensure it is. However, I disagree about the keeping one geeky person around. I think a lot of the frustrations that ‘hobbyists’ have about Media Center is that the interface was designed for every day users, like our mothers, and doesn’t offer the advanced features that hobbyists have come to expect from other programs.

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This would be great for apartment buildings where you have to share a laundry room. From The washer goes wireless:

How can I get on the selfhost/dogfooding program for this? :)

Are you ready for this? Microsoft, Whirlpool, Hewlett-Packard and other members of the Internet Home Alliance are about to start testing a system that connects a washer and dryer to a home network to deliver notifications to TV screens, PC monitors or cell phones about the status of a laundry load.

The “Laundry Time” system also goes further, to let people control the washer and dryer from a distance — pressing a button on a cell phone, for example, to keep the dryer going a few extra minutes until you get home. Microsoft created the Laundry Time software, which works in conjunction with the company’s Media Center PC and mobile-phone technology.

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