4 posts tagged “tech-tip”
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...
Stuck travelling to one of the NFL games in person? Can't stand the thought of missing the action while you're there?Rent one of these -- it's called "Kangaroo TV" and it's about $24 per game. It's an in-stadium broadcast of the DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket, and it also has current scores, stats for every player by position, etc. Not bad ... a little bit hard to use and the broadcast quality of the video leaves a little bit to be desired, but it was fun to have with us at the stadium today. Amazingly, we left it on the entire time and the battery never went dead...
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).
I wanted to send my sister driving directions to the Puyallup fair ... on her cel phone. Sure, I can type txt on my cel and send it to her, but I wanted to copy text from a web site (PC), clean it up and send it to her. Of course this is WAY EASIER to do with a PC ... as if you were sending an email ... but what address do you send it to?
The problem with sending TXT messages to a phone from a PC email client is you don't know what carrier most people's cel phones are on.
The solution: send the message from your email to <phone number>@teleflip.com.
For example, 2065551212@teleflip.com
The teleflip service figures out what the right address is for anyone's cel phone so you don't have to. It's super handy ... and free. Worked for me, try it out yourself!
