Sure, you can get one of those fancy MCE remote controls to maneuver your way through your music, movies, and TV recordings on your Windows Media Center.

But if you're usually watching TV with your laptop or UMPC on the coffee table anyway, you can just pull up this new MCE Virtual Remote. Developed by Ryan Tollefson, MCE Virtual Remote is an easy to use interface for Charlie Kindel's MCE Controller.

In order to install MCE Virtual Remote, you'll need to run MCE Controller, create a MCE Virtual Remote folder, copy the program to that folder and click run. It's a pretty basic script, so you'll have to make your own shortcut.

The remote should work great on any touchscreen tablet or Ultra Mobile PC. Or you can just run it on your laptop and click away at the controls with your mouse when you want to fast forward, rewind, pause, or mute your MCE machine.

[via Chris Lanier's Blog]

Remember that little web interface for Media Portal we told you about the other day? Yeah, turns out it was largely ripped off from Doug Berrett's WebGuide4 for Windows Media Center.

Chris Lanier noticed how similar the graphics were on the two products, and after a little snooping, Barrett and others noticed that those similarities seem to extend to the program's code.

Media Portal has posted an apology of sorts, stating that the team borrowed some graphics to use during the testing phase of the project. And then they forgot to remove those graphics before issuing a release. The web guide is no longer available for download.

While it would be nice to see a web interface for Media Portal, there's no real excuse for stealing code. Hopefully the team will be able to remove all the code and issue an update in the future. And hopefully they'll post a more sincere apology to Barrett than "sorry for ripping off your graphics, we meant to clean it up before sending it out to the public. Whoops."

MCEtilities from ActiveASP Software is a tool for editing DVR-MS metadata files and viewing metadata for dvdxml files on Windows MCE 2005 and Vista computers. This is beta software, so metadata editing for DVD files should be coming soon. There's also an SDK for anyone who wants to write their own plugins.

But MCEtilities does more than offer up a pretty interface for editing information about the videos stored on your computer. It also gives you limited control of DVD changers like Sony's XL1B2 which, as Chris Lanier points out, you can pick up for about $200. MCEutilties will let you mount, unmount, eject, and rip DVDs from the changer.

Does that mean batch DVD-ripping? No. At the moment, you need to hit a button to begin ripping each DVD. But the developer is looking for ways to implement batch ripping in the future, which would allow you to backup your entire DVD collection onto your computer while you sleep, work, or go on vacation (depending on how large your DVD collection is).

[via Chris Lanier]

Aufero is an information gathering application written for use with Vista Media Center. Oh yeah, and it has a BitTorrent Client written in. The program's still in development, and there's no download available yet, but here's what Aufero's meant to do:

• Navigate and view information about movies, previews, trailers, reviews, and torrent files using your remote control.
  
• Manually download torrents.
• Manage library of downloaded media.
• Create a wish list of videos you'd like to download, and schedule automatic recordings as soon as that video is available.
• Notifications when a video file is downloaded.

[via Chris Lanier]

Sure, Microsoft's built CableCard compatibility into Windows Vista, but what have they done for Satellite television customers lately? Well, apparently, Microsoft is working with both DirecTV and Dish Network on cards that would allow home theater PC users to receive satellite signals directly through their computer.

Microsoft and DirecTV first announced they were working on HTPC cards over a year ago, but the first news that Dish Network was involved in similar talks came out of CES this January.