4 posts tagged “media center”
This week at Digital Life we launched some new stuff for Media Center... (1) four brand-new "Extender" devices that you can buy to make your Media Center show up on TV sets all over your house, and (2) a feature called "Internet TV" that lets you watch high quality streaming video from the internet on your Media Center (or extender) without needing a TV tuner. Here's a sample blog writeup with some screenshots.
As part of my job I had the privilege of doing a keynote speech at the Digital Life event... and this was videotaped and made available as part of Media Center Internet TV ... so, for the first time, I'm on "Internet TV"! Seems even cooler to me than being on regular TV. :) That's a picture, above, of the TV in our bedroom running Internet TV with a media center extender.
If you'd like to learn about this new stuff, you should watch my talk! Two ways to do it:
- use Internet TV! This is high-quality video, and you can watch it on your TV set if you have a media center extender and Windows Vista. If not, you can also watch it on your Windows Vista PC. Launch "Media Center", and under "TV & Movies", choose "Internet TV".
- if you don't have a Windows Vista PC, you can watch a lower quality web streaming video from here.
And here's a few pics from my keynote...
This year our fantasy football league moved to yahoo... and one of the nice side benefits of yahoo is that they have a media center plug-in for "Yahoo Sports". The plug-in has a fantasy football feature, so you can have your fantasy league scores shown in a dynamic on-screen ticker WHILE YOU ARE WATCHING THE GAMES.
The pic shows...the yahoo plug-in running on my Media Center PC, which is hooked up directly to the plasma. That's our league scores (my team is winning...) on the left and live, hidef TV playing in the inset window.
i sometimes also have a PIP which I can use to show additional games either through media center extender running on my Xbox360 -OR- via DirecTV satellite box (separate from media center). Sure will be nice when we have support for DirecTV and NFL Sunday Ticket native in Media Center!
If you have media center and want to try this... just click on "Yahoo Sports" in the Online Media section of your start menu (Vista) or Online Spotlight (XP).
Dan Lyons (aka the famous "Fake Steve Jobs" blogger) wrote an article for Forbes magazine talking about how Media Center is a great way to consume all the digital entertainment you'd want on TVs around your house... and how it's ahead of what Apple has got. Here's a few quotes:
Guess who's got the slickest software for handling TV, movies and music? Not Apple.
You've seen the Apple ads: Microsoft is the dorky, puffy loser who runs spreadsheets, Mac the slick, sleek Gen-Xer who has fun with music and movies. You haven't seen any ads, though, for a new product that can do things with digital media that even Apple can't match--and it comes from none other than Microsoft.
A PC running Windows Vista and hooked to a Microsoft Xbox 360 can outgun the coolest Macintosh, thanks to a key program called Media Center, now built into high-end versions of Vista, the latest generation of Windows. Microsoft hasn't touted Media Center much in hyping Vista, but surely it should.
...
You can attach a computer running Media Center directly to your TV. But who wants to have a computer sitting next to the TV? Better solution is to send data from the computer to your Wi-Fi router. From there it goes to a hardware device such as an Xbox 360 game player, which catches the signal and relays it to the TV.
The very idea of setting up these pieces is enough to give me the heebie-jeebies. Microsoft? On multiple devices that need to work together? With software that needs to be configured? Does the phrase "blue screen of death" resonate at all? Fear not. Microsoft has figured this stuff out.
...
The cool thing was that with a single remote control, on a single screen, we could "consume media" without caring where it originated--on cable, the Internet or our computer's hard drive. This unified world of Web, TV and homegrown content is something our kids will grow up taking for granted.
For now Microsoft offers the best way to get a glimpse of the future...
