Now that most computers on sale at your local Best Buy or Circuit City are running Windows Vista Home Premium, there are a lot of folks out there with Windows Media Center, although they might not realize it. You can use your PC just fine without ever looking at its 10-foot interface.

Still, market research firm In-Stat projects that nearly 51 million TV tuners will be sold by around the wold 2011. That could turn what's now a niche market into a multi-billion dollar industry.

Most consumers will probably find a TV tuner bundled with their PC running Windows Vista. But those numbers also include USB tuners and CableCard tuners that probably won't be bundled with many PCs.

Hopefully as the market for PC-based personal video recorders grows we'll see more innovations in the software market with more companies developing commercial plugins for Windows Media Center. Of course, there are plenty of free plugins available today to do everything from singing karaoke to checking the weather forecasts. But there's plenty of incentive for developers to think outside the box with a potential customer base of 51-million people.

[via The Green Button]

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?