Control your Media Center from a UMPC with Mirage

Sure, it's nice to have a fancy remote control to go along with your expensive media center PC. But if you've got a laptop or UMPC lying around, it could be the best remote of all, giving you near-complete control over Windows Media Center running on your PC.

Autonomic Home's Mirage is a Flash-based program that works with Media Media Control Server to give you control over music, video, and photo playback. Mirage works with Windows Vista and Windows MCE 2005. It acts as more than a remote control. If you're using it to play music on your PC, Mirage will display metadata like album art and ID tags. If you're controlling TV playback, you'll get similar data. And so on.

Mirage is free while in beta, and includes a free trial of Media Control Server. But a full version of Media Control Server will set you back $500. It's obviously meant more for professional use, but Mirage looks like a great consumer level product. Hopefully a future version will include some of the same functionality without the high price tag.

[via Chris Lanier]