Here’s an awesome little Windows Phone app in development, as highlighted by Ian over at thedigitallifestyle.com
Something I’ve been working away at in the background is the Windowsphone 7 client for byRemote for Windows 7 Media Center. The client runs as a Silverlight4 based Windowsphone7 application (so can be launched as a first class citizen from the Windowsphone 7 main menu) – and hopefully it will make it’s way to the windowsphone store at some point.
via byRemote
Here’s a great tip for how to avoid setting up your Windows Media Center and constantly starring at the shared folder on your Windows Home Server, rather than the contents of that folder (as above).
Rather than use the Windows 7 libraries (contrary to common sense) a fix can be found by using the old Windows XP/Vista method of changing the location used by your profiles My Pictures and My Videos folder.
Right click on My Pictures and select properties
Click the location tab and select the Move button
Navigate to your home server and click on the pictures folder and hit Select Folder
Then, just OK out of the properties window. You will be asked if you want to move your files, I let it, but I don’t have any files anyway, so it doesn’t have any side effect for me, if you have data already in you My Pictures folder, you should consider moving it first.
This tricks Windows Media Center into showing the contents of these folders, rather than just the shared folder, the same can be done to fix My Videos.
This tip via the excellent blog, Missing Remote.
Now this looks like a great little tool for users of Windows Media Center. The Meteor app is designed to give users a local presentation of content that exists on their Windows Media Center, for remote control, really useful for music and entertaining, where you don’t need to be in front of the screen to have control over the selection.
Now Playing
The Now Playing section is the go-to section of the Hub. Here the user will be able to easily manipulate the currently playing media item; be it a song, an album, a podcast, a TV show or a movie. The user is able to easily change track and scrub to a specific position in the media item.Recent
The Recent section is where the history of what the user has played on their media center is displayed. It currently shows the last 7 media “filters” that have played. Filters is a concept we’ll get into a little bit later, but is core to the way that Meteor works and how smart it can be with your media.Library
The final section here is the user’s media library. Here the user can easily jump to different areas of their media and browse to them in an integrated and intuitive way.
via The Land Dolphin.
Cute, but still very expensive.
Apple has today unveiled a freshly redesigned Mac mini, which benefits from a unibody aluminum exterior and more grunt under the hood. Prices start rolling at $699, where you’ll get a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. A HDMI-out is finally included, as is an SD card reader and what Apple claims is a doubling of graphics performance thanks to an NVIDIA GeForce 320M chip inside.
via Engadget.
Very interesting and disturbing change to enhance the copyright controls imposed over Freeview HD services, I wonder what impact this will have over the Windows Media Center
Ofcom has granted the BBC the power to introduce anti-piracy technology to Freeview to limit the illegal copying of high-definition TV shows, despite complaints from organisations including the Open Rights Group that it is not in consumer or competition interest.
The BBC, which in November had its request denied until issues raised by ORG had been addressed, is to be allowed to change the Freeview multiplex licence to allow copy protection technology in set-top boxes so HD shows from broadcasters also including Channel 4 and ITV cannot become the target of pirates.
Ofcom said today that only manufacturers of set-top boxes and Freeview HD TV sets that include anti-piracy technology will be allowed to be compatible with the Freeview electronic programming guide. This will allow broadcasters to stop piracy of shows.
via guardian.co.uk.
This is an excellent tip for media center users, who would prefer to administrate their pc’s remotely rather than direct, this enables users to quit a session and restore the account to the local account…
All you have to do is run a simple command that will log you off and return the system to it’s console. Create a shortcut on the desktop called End RDP and use this command as the target…
%windir%\System32\tscon.exe RDP-Tcp#0 /dest:console
A couple of things to remember. If you find it not working, check the user session that you are using on the RDP. Open Task Manager and check the users tab. See the session tab at the right? That number, in this case it’s 0, corresponds to the number in the command. RDP-Tcp#0
One thing to note, this tip doesn’t work the hack to enable remote desktop access in Windows 7 Home Premium as home premium doesn’t include tscon.exe, which is unfortunate but a small downside to a very handy hack.
via Home Server Show.
After wasting hours riffling around the internet to try and find a simple and reliable solution for playing mkv files in Windows 7 Media Center, under the x64 bit version.
On paper the shift from the 32 to 64bit version of Windows is pretty painless, as there’s much improved driver support these days (as anyone who tried the x64 version of XP can attest to)
The main pain point is that even in the x64 version of windows, Media Player still defaults to the 32bit version, which is great for compatibility with the existing codecs, it also draws you into a confusing situation where a file will play in Media Player and refuse point blank to play in Media Center.
This is due to Media Center being a native x64 application, so requiring x64 codecs. Forunately things had improved over the last few months in this regard, now there are two free applications I can recommend to add .mkv support…
Divx Lab’s MKV Codec
The Divx Lab’s project aims to utilize the Windows Media Foundation to enable playback of the popular MKV format on both the main Media Center machine as well as extenders. Not only does this mean support for extenders but it could also very well mean the end to playing with various codec package settings to tweak the audio/video settings to match the output of the default Media Center playback.
via Playing MKVs with Media Foundation and Divx Labs.
Haali’s Matroska Splitter
Haali’s Matroska splitter is one of the most popular MKV splitters available for Media Center users who run custom codec setups. Little secret though, there’s a beta Haali splitter available for x64 systems and it works great on Windows 7 systems.
via Finding Haali’s x64 Splitter Beta
AC3Filter
AC3Filter is a high quality free audio decoder and processor filter. It allows media players to playback movies with AC3 and DTS audio tracks. Also it can process any audio track, much of processing options allows to adjust the sound in almost any way. It is possible to upmix any audio source to 6 channels. Filter can do multi-channel and digital (SPDIF) output. It can encode any audio source to AC3 on-the-fly and send it over SPDIF to the receiver. Download the full version for x64 support.
via Ac3filter
MKV Thumbnails in Windows
Finally if you want to enable thumbnails of videos within Media Center and Windows Explorer, you will need to add some information to your systems registry.
Download the x86 version here or x64 version here and more information can be found at hack7mc.com
Big thanks to the always brilliant Hacking Windows 7 Media Center for the in depth and up to date codec information
Looks like a nice little sofa controller for those who like to mix Media Center’s 10 foot UI with a bit of web browsing…
That meager tithe takes home a 2.4GHz keyboard with trackball and USB “nano dongle” for your Windows home theater PC good for about 10-meters of wireless sofa surfing. See it in the wild after the break.
via Engadget.