I am a guest on the Windows Media Center Show

The latest episode of the Windows Media Center Show was just posted and I am the guest this week.  Click on over to Ian Dixon’s website to listen.

For those of you discovering the site after listening to this weeks episode, Welcome.  I hope you like what you see and decide to stay and subscribe.  The purpose of the blog is to talk about Windows Media Center and HTPC’s from a layman’s perspective.  I try to stick to what an enthusiast would want to do in their home without getting overly complicated.

Check out the last post to see what’s coming up in the next few weeks and thanks again for dropping by.

– Andres

Remote Potato Updated

After what has felt like a “Remote Scheduling” drought of epic proportions for Media Center users we are now being flooded by two great remote scheduling applications: Big EPG ByRemote and Remote Potato.    ByRemote has been getting a lot of press lately but Remote Potato has not been sitting on the hands either.

Ian Dixon over at the Digital Lifestyle just reported on an update to Remote Potato and I must say that it’s really looking good.  Check out the screencast below:

 

So will all of these advances by the community stifle an official Microsoft effort or is there still a chance that WebGuide will come back?  Time will tell I guess.  In the meanwhile I am enjoying trying out Remote Potato.

My Movies 3.0 Is Coming!!

MyMovies was the go to plugin for organizing your movie collection in Media Center. Over time it started to show it’s age. We did get small updates and a nice Windows Home Server version to centralize the database. Finally after much anticipation we have news on MyMovies 3.0 from Ian Dixon:

I have some exclusive screenshots of the all new My Movies 3. On Tuesday I will have an interview with Brian Binnerup the developer behind My Movies and he is going to talk about the new features and UI in the Vista and Windows 7 version of My Movies. Tuesday will also be the release of the beta of the new movie app so listen to the show next week to find out all the details. I have to say its a great looking Media Center application!

I cannot wait to check this out. I really hope it brings much needed speed and stability to my movie collection. Check out Ian’s post for the screenshots.

MyMovies 3.0 Screenshots and Release Date

UPDATE: I just checked out the MyMovies website and I am stoked! It seems that it will have the speed improvements that I am craving. Check out this quote from the site.

My Movies 3 is mainly a new MCML (Media Center Markup Language) based interface, which will be much faster than our current interface. The interface is able to launch a collection of 2.500 titles in 3 seconds, and a collection with 10.000 titles in 5 seconds – the limitation on collection sizes with good speed will be above 25.000 titles.

My collection is up to about 420 movies so this should work great for me.