mce

Mike Garcen of Missing Remote has written up a detailed comparison of three programs that leverage your PC to let you watch live TV from any internet-connected PC.

Orb, WebGuide4 and SageTV Placeshifter are all programs that let you access your home computer to watch and record live TV over the internet. SageTV Placeshifter is designed to work with SageTV, and has an interface that looks just like the desktop application. WebGuide4 works with Windows Media Center, and Orb works with pretty much anything.

My Blockbuster v0.1 is a new Windows Media Center plugin that lets you manage your Blockbuster Total Access queue while sitting on your couch.

The free plugin lets you:

• Add and remove titles from your queue
• Browse new releases, recommendations, genres, and collections
• Search for movies
• View movie details
• View similar titles
• View all editions available for a title
• Watch movie trailers

The plugin is for Windows XP MCE 2005 only at the moment.

[via Chris Lanier's Blog]

So there are any number of ways to resolve conflicts on a PVR. Some rudimentary PVRs won't know what to do if you've got two shows set to record at the same time -- even if one program ends at 9:01 and the next begins at 9:00. So they just skip the second recording.

But many PVR boxes or software packages now let you automatically cut off the beginning of the next show so that you don't miss the end of the first show.

Of course, if you have multiple TV tuners in your set-top-box or computer, conflicts don't arise as often. But what if you've got multiple Windows Media Center PCs throughout the house -- each with just one TV tuner? Wouldn't it be nice if they would talk to each other and resolve conflicts together?

The developer behind DVRMSToolbox has released a program that does just that. Recording Broker lets you schedule all your recordings on one box running Windows Media Center. If you're out of tuners on that PC and there's another PC on the network with a free tuner, Recording Broker will send the scheduled recording over to the second computer.

By default, Windows Media Center gives you a live TV pause buffer of 30 minutes. That means if you hit pause, you've got about 30 minutes to go check on dinner, take out the trash or do whatever other chores need doing before your PC will decide it's had enough and just start playing again.

Through some registry hacking, you can extend that buffer time, but you'd better be sure you know what you're doing before you go mucking around in the registry.

That's where MCE Live TV Buffer Manager comes in. This new application lets you extend your buffer size up to two hours and 15 minutes, without having to manually change your registry settings. The program should work with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and Windows Vista systems.

[via Ian Dixon]

Ever wish you could trim the commercials on your Windows Media Center recordings, or create a short clip of a video to post on YouTube (assuming you're not watching a Viacom program), without having to pull out the ole keyboard and mouse?

Media Center Cutter is an upcoming Vista Media Center plugin from MCEDev that will allow basic video editing from within the Media Center interface. The program will let you edit and/or cut DVR-MS files. You can automatically convert files to other formats for exporting to a Zune, iPod, or other portable device. And the final recording will retain metadata including show and episode titles.

No word on a release date yet, but a pre-release version was shown off recently at CeBIT.

[via Chris Lanier's Blog]

I've been absent from the pages of TV Squad and PVR Wire for a few weeks, partly due to a combination of personal circumstances and downright laziness, but also because I've been up to something I should have done a long time ago.

In short, I built myself a Windows Media Center PC.

I know, I know -- it's something I should have done a long time ago, especially given that I've been writing about MCE on PVR Wire for over a year.

MCEMailbox isn't the only program for checking your email using Vista Media Center's 10 foot interface, but it is a pretty slick option.

MCEMailbox lets you check POP3 and secure POP3 mailboxes. The add-in checks for new mail at regular intervals and sends you a notification when a new message arrives. You can also access the program directly and view the contents of your inbox, which you can sort by date, subject or sender.

I've never been sure that a 10 foot interface is ideal for reading email, RSS feeds, or really any content that's ext heavy. That said, as someone who works from home, it'd be awful nice to be able take a break for lunch, watch a movie, and not feel like I have to keep pausing it to check and see if I have new email that requires immediate attention.

[via Ian Dixon]

Apparently Orb went and snuck a really cool feature into version 2.0 without bothering to tell us about it. Orb generally lets you access videos, live TV, photos, audio, and other files from your computer through a web interface.

But Ian Dixon was snooping around his computer the other day and found a file called orb.mcl in his Orb directory. Hey, MCL files are Windows Media Center files! What happens when you click on it? Windows Media Center starts, and asks you to sign in with your Orb username and password.

Here's where it gets really interesting. If you're running an Orb server client on your home computer, but login using orb.mcl on a different computer, you can browse all of the shared files on your home computer using Windows Media Center's 10-foot interface. Pop on over to your buddies house to watch the big game that you recorded last night. Go visit grandma and show her your latest vacation photos for a change. This is all assuming your grandma and buddy have Windows Media Center and a broadband connection.

So you've got a PC running Windows Media Center in the living room, but you'd like to be able to watch stored recordings on other PCs in the house. Sure, you could set up a system of media center extenders, but what if you're running MCE on those machines as well? Wouldn't it be nice to just share files over the network?

Doug Knox has developed a program that lets you do just that. MCE 2005 - Share Recorded TV does just what its name suggests, it lets you share recorded programs between Windows MCE 2005 machines. It has not been tested on Vista yet.

In order to share videos, all you have to do is check a tab that says "allow other Media Center PCs to access yoru Recorded TV Content," add a list of shared folders, and reboot. On the machine you'd like to use to watch those files, you run the same program and add the shared folders.

[via Ian Dixon]

Not even 2 full days ago, Brad wrote about how we can expect to see a Vista Sidebar Gadget for WebGuide 4.0. But at the time no there no date set in stone as to when it would be available to download.

Well at some point within the last 24 hours or so the creator of WebGuide4, Doug Berret, posted the release version, which can be obtained from his website.

A few days ago I made a brief mention of DVRMSToolbox in a post about enabling Commercial Skip in Media Center. Since then, a newer version (1.1.0.4) has been released and can be obtained from the author's blog.

If you haven't used DVRMSToolbox in the past, I would highly recommend checking it out if you run a Media Center based PC. It adds a whole new level of flexibility to the experience by giving you the ability to manipulate the DVRMS files that Media Center records to.

Yesterday Nielson released some new findings regarding how likely PVR users are to watch commercials. Well today is a new day and with that Chris Lanier has given us a quick run-through of what needs to be done to activate automatic commercial skipping in Media Center. Take that Nielson ...

The main ingredient for this tasty treat is the good old DVRMSToolbox application which can be found here. During installation there is actually an option that you can check off which tells it to automatically skip commercials. By checking this off, you will be prompted about whether you want Commercial Skip to process the show when you start to view recorded content.

One of the great things about Windows Media Center is that it is more than just a PVR. As the name implies, it's a central location for all of your photos, music, recorded TV as well as DVDs.

With Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, when you ripped a DVD to your hard drive, you could access it through your MCE interface via the 'My Videos' folder. This is great as it allows you to easily create a DVD jukebox. But where do they appear in Vista's Media Center?

Everyone's favorite remote management tool for Windows Media Center, WebGuide4, has been updated to version 4.016. The newest version is now completely compatible with Vista (including the x64 release), which is good news for early adopters of the new OS.

If you run Windows MCE 2005 or a version of Vista with Media Center included, this application is well worth taking the time to check out. The concept behind the application is simple: allow users to view their Media Center content from any web browser or PocketPC / Smarthphone enabled device.

Other features include remote management of recorded shows, scheduling recordings via a web browser and the ability to create different user accounts to restrict access to your Media Center PC.

For a complete list of updates in this release, you can check out eHomeUpgrage's post on this. If you are interested in trying out WebGuide, you can find it here.

Well folks, you've seen the ads, you've heard the hype -- and some of you have probably already bought the software.

Of course, I'm talking about Microsoft's Vista -- and if you're a PVR nut like me, you probably picked it up to try out the Media Center features built in to Vista Ultimate.

We went one better than that, and decided to have a chat with Mark Schwesinger, Program Manager for the Media Center PVR team at Microsoft. Here's what Mark had to say about Vista, Zune, MCE and Apple...