Entries tagged with wmc - Channel 10

What’s New With Windows Media Center in Windows 7

sarahintampa — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:59:00 GMT

In Windows 7, Windows Media Center is getting a makeover. Nothing too radical is changing, and that’s good, because WMC is a pretty solid program already. Some of the biggest changes involve the back-end and how content is moved across the network. The new code reflects this shift towards more seamless interconnectivity between our devices as well as a desire to make third-party WMC applications feel more like the native elements of the program. To that end, developers of WMC apps should definitely check out this post which details some of the code changes in the version of WMC found in the PDC build of Windows 7.

However, it’s Charlie Owen who gives us the most complete run-through of the front-end changes. We've summarized them here:

Start Menu: text and iconography size changes
Music: for albums with no album art, tiles will display a random color with album title instead of just blue background and white text like before:

Details: Details is a new feature found throughout WMC that puts frequently accessed features within closer reach. (Reminds me of jump lists, but for WMC.) Album Details:

Music Now Playing: As music plays, action items (menu options) fade away and the album art is animated into a slowly scrolling wall of covers and occasionally switches the currently playing album cover and metadata.
Rating Shortcuts: you can enable rating shortcuts to easily rate content from one to five using your keyboard:

Turbo Scroll: Holding down left or right remote buttons will begin to scroll through libraries at faster speeds, presenting content in alphabetical chunks.
Shared Libraries: Like in Windows 7 itself, Shared Libraries let you enjoy media content from multiple computers across your home network.
Ambient Slideshow for Photos: The new ambient slideshow feature will launch as a screensaver with you start the new “Play Favorites” on the Start Menu. It pulls in pics rated 3 stars or higher. Pictures zoom in and out in an unstructured way.
Enhanced Libraries: The new picture library highlights ratings, slideshows, and shared photos all new selections from the top menu. The video, music, and recorded TV libraries also get the Shared feature. New Picture Library:

H.264 Support: H.264 support is enabled out-of-the-box on Windows 7 and on the Xbox 360 when in Extender mode.
Video Play All: Plays all the videos in a specific gallery. Videos also resume where you left off.
TV Pack: The new WMC will feature all the enhancements found in the TV Pack (more on that here). Among other things, this includes:
- A clickable seek bar when playing videos
- Press the right or left arrow buttons when playing a video for more functions like zoom or settings that were previously buried:

Recorded TV gallery gets an “All Content” view
HD channels are mapped and emblazoned with the HD logo:HD Movies: a new HD pivot is found in the movies section
The TV Guide turbo scrolls:

New Extras Section Replaces Online Media: More details coming soon on this…hmmmm:

On screen keyboard: A new on screen keyboard is now available for text entry:

Desktop Gadget: A new desktop gadget is being made available for quick access to music, slideshows, or both. The green button on the gadget will also launch WMC. Gadget + Gadget Details:

For more details and additional screenshots, click through to Charlie Owen’s post.

Microsoft Buys “The Green Button”

sarahintampa — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:03:00 GMT

Windows Media Center enthusiasts are definitely fans of The Green Button. The site is one of the largest and most active forums for everything WMC on the net today. Recently, The Green Button was purchased by Microsoft, who will continue to run the site with a few changes. One of the big changes is the elimination of ads. (Well, at least for the moment. They may come back, but definitely not as many as before.) For now, the ads have been removed completely.

There will also be a few cosmetic changes to the site and the site will be moved to Microsoft’s data centers where its infrastructure will be much better supported. The site’s admin, Daniel Sterling, assured forum members on this thread that the site’s main focus will remaining on connecting the Windows Media Center community. In fact, he even hinted that it will be adding more socialization features in the future, but no world yet on what those specifically might be. It sounds like TGB might be morphing into more of a social network in the future, though, doesn’t it? (Thanks to We Got Served for this news.)

Coming Soon: Get Facebook on Media Center

sarahintampa — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:50:00 GMT

It seems that lately I’ve just been finding more and more Windows Media Center plugins. The latest one I stumbled across (Thanks Ian!) is a way to get Facebook on Media Center. This is thanks to a soon-to-be-released application called Photato, which will be available in beta later this month. It looks like the Photato app will focus on bringing Facebook photos to your Vista Media Center – both those belonging to you as well as the photos that your friends are sharing. At the moment, the website for the application hasn’t launched yet, but for those interested in beta testing the application, you can email photato.beta@armchairware.com. (image thanks to Ian Dixon’s Blog)

3 Ways To Stream Netflix Movies From Your PC to TV

sarahintampa — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 09:47:00 GMT

Last year, Neflix started offering the ability to stream movies over the internet to your PC. Of course, for Windows Media Player enthusiasts, the next logical step was to port Netflix into Media Center by way of a plugin. Luckily, there's a pretty active developer community for WMC, so we ended up with not one, but three, Windows Media Player plugins from which to choose: vmcNetflix, MyNetflix, and NetflixMC.

But which one is right for you? Let's compare:

MyNeflix

System Requirements: Vista MCE, .NET 2.0, Netflix WatchNow player
View Netflix queue
Manage Netflix queue
View history
View recommendations
Browse movies by title, genre, or top 100
Browse "Watch Now" movies
Play movies in full screen
Nice interface, very responsive
Does Not Work With Extenders
Download MyNetflix

vmcNetFlix

System Requirements: Vista MCE and Netflix WatchNow player
View Netflix queue
Manage Netflix queue
View history
View recommendations
Browse movies by genres; sort by title or year
Browse "Watch Now" movies
Keyword Search
Play movies in full screen
Support for x64 and x86
Support for Netflix Instant Queue
Support for Episode Listings
Prevents standby/sleep mode while downloading
Clean interface, easy to browse, runs smoothly
Works With Extenders
Download vmcNetflix

NetflixMC

System Requirements: Vista or MCE 2005 and .NET 2.0 or 3.5
Browse movies by genre
Browse "Watch Now" movies
Fast, Real-time "Watch Now" search
Bookmark "Watch Now" movies
TV Series episode selection
Image caching stream speed settings
Menu Personalization
A bit slow, still a “beta” app
Runs on extenders but WILL NOT play WatchNow videos
Download NetflixMC

So which one should you choose? The quick answer here is that if you have Windows XP, you only have one choice: NetflixMC. For Vista users, both MyNetflix and vmcNetflix are nice, but the extender support that vmcNetflix has makes it the clear winner. You can download vmcNetflix here.

Olympics Are Coming To Media Center

sarahintampa — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:16:00 GMT

The 2008 Beijing Olympics are nearly here and along with the Silverlight-powered NBCOlympics website, the Microsoft/NBC partnership will also bring us video from the Olympic Games right to our Media Center PCs. These videos will be made available as clips on Vista Media Center and organized into channels based on event (e.g. swimming, gymnastics, track & field, etc.) The service, called "Olympics On the Go," won't be offering live coverage, but will be providing "up-to-HD quality" automatic downloads with help from digital content provider, Wavexpress's TVTonic. Because the content is downloaded instead of streamed, the footage can be watched whether you're online or not. And since Media Center extenders like the Xbox 360 let you view content on other devices besides a PC, you can watch the Olympics events you want to see from any room in your home. Best of all, this service will be completely free!

New Windows Media Center Extender: HP MediaSmart Connect

sarahintampa — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:18:00 GMT

This summer there’s going to be a new Windows Media Center Extender from HP called the HP MediaSmart Connect. With this new extender, you can wirelessly stream multimedia like TV, music, videos, and photos all around your house either over your wired network or over Wi-Fi. If you’re interested in learning more about this new extender, the Windows Vista Team blog recently pointed me to some webinars that are being put on by both Microsoft and HP to introduce and demonstrate the capabilities of this new extenders. HP’s Director of Marketing for their Connected Entertainment Group, Brian Burch, will be hosting, but it’s the guests that will be making these webinars worth the watch. Like Patrick Norton, for example. I’m a huge fan of Tekzilla myself, so I can’t wait to see what Patrick has to say about the MediaSmart Connect. Other guests include Ed Bott (ZDNet), Ian Dixon (The Digital Lifestyle), and Mike Garcen (Missing Remote).

Here’s the schedule for the webinars:

Tuesday, June 24th - 10:00 am PST with Ed Bott, http://www.zdnet.com/
Thursday, June 26th - 1:00 pm PST with Ian Dixon, http://www.thedigitallifestyle.com/
Tuesday, July 8th - 10:00 am PST with Patrick Norton, http://www.tekzilla.com/
Thursday, July 10th - 1:00 pm PST with Mike Garcen, http://www.missingremote.com/

Click here to register.