Ian Dixon has a post with video about using the Windows Vista version of MCE through his XBox 360, Running Vista Media Center on my XBOX 360 (with Video):

Last night I played with the extender function of Windows Vista. This is the first time I have got my XBOX 360 working as an extender with Vista.
Using the latest build of Vista (5472) I setup up the XBOX 360 as an extender. The setup was very simple, it seems slicker that the XP version and maybe a little quicker.
Once up and running it looks exactly like Media Center running on Vista, with the new UI and sounds.

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We’re having another Windows Vista install fair Saturday August 12th. If you’re interested in us installing it for you and you’re in the Redmond area send me an email and I’ll forward you the details.

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You don’t have to wait for Vista for some bugs to be fixed. Get the July rollup for fixes to Media Center 2005. What does this fix?

• Horizontal white lines appear when playing a DVD
• Media Center may crash when using the ListMaker SDK sample application
• Media Center may crash when you open a menu page
• A black screen appears when trying to play a DVD

There more details in the kb article.

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Media Center Control Server. Features:

• Provides Two Way IP Control Protocol.
• Controls Media Center Extenders
• Browse & Search Media Library
• Live Transport and Navigation Feedback
• Display Album Art
• Random Access MCE Interface Navigation
• Issue IR-Remote Commands
• Ultra fast and reliable operation
• Works with Windows XP and Vista

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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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There have been recurring questions about our re-design on the beta newsgroups. And yes, I know a lot of users liked our old Start Menu model which consisted of a homepage containing links to experience specific homepages. However, our homepages were bursting at the seams. For many homepages, we could no longer add any more buttons on the left hand side. For many locales (i.e. Germany) the string containers on those pages weren’t large enough to support the longer text. For many OEMs and third party add-ons they did not like how far away their applications were from Media Center’s core experiences. And so we sought to re-design the Start Menu to address some of those concerns.

To respond to one of the threads I pinged one of our lead designers to get his thoughts on our redesign. This is what he wrote:

There are three key decisions we made in Vista that dramatically change the
way MCE 2005 worked from the start (pardon the pun).

1. Content is king - We want to get you to your content quickly and leave
   you in your content. This means less navigating around multiple home pages
   and menus to get you to what you want. It requires more work on the user’s
   part to find the right link at first but the end result is greater control
   in the long term.
2. Context is king - To reduce the amount of navigation up and down the UI
   hierarchy the Start menu is now context sensitive. The Beta version doesn’t
   reflect this yet but future versions will allow the Start menu to be
   “sticky” thus allowing you the ability to transverse the current experience
   easily and more efficiently within your current experience.
3. Vista is more scalable - The start menu and galleries accommodate partner
   integration and expansion better than MCE 2005. We can expose the user to
   richer content in context of your experience.

Over time Vista MCE will grow and accommodate user needs better.

And I agree with many of you that the new design isn’t as simple as the old design but the more you use it the more I think you’ll find that as our designer points out above, it is much more powerful. Now are we making the right trade off between simplicity and powerfulness? I think we are but we don’t base decisions like that by just listening to our designers, program managers and developers (someone on the newsgroup asked if our product was designed solely by develoeprs). We also have a large usability team who validates the decisions we as a group make on real end users (most of whom have never used MCE before) to ensure that we are indeed making forward progress.

In the end I hope you will all come around to liking the changes if you don’t already. If you don’t, well, there’s always MCE 2005 :).

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Julie at CE Pro has an article out on a new Dell remote featuring a LCD screen, Dell Ships MCE Remote with Two-Way RF and Metadata.

What you probably haven’t seen is the awesome universal remote that comes with the Media Center Edition (MCE) computer.

The Premium Remote Control that comes with the M2010 receives metadata from the MCE so users can browse their music libraries, searching for artists, songs, genres, playlists, the usual. Just click to play. It even works when the M2010 is closed up and stowed away.

The remote looks really cool, I hope they sell a standalone version.

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I just noticed that Scendix’s MCEAuction won eBay’s Star Developer Award. Wow, cool!

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