For years, developer Doug Berrett has been toiling away at an application that really should have been developed by Microsoft. WebGuide provides a slew of ways to interact with your Windows Media Center PC on the go, whether you want to remotely schedule recordings or stream recorded TV shows.

Well, it looks like Microsoft noticed Berrett's work, and the company went and hired him. While this is great news for Berrett, it's also good news for you. Because it means that WebGuide is now available as a free download. No more $18 fee to register your software.

Berrett will be working with the Media Center team to push Media Center "into the high-end custom installation market," which means he won't be offering updates to WebGuide anymore. But he did push out one final release yesterday. Updates for Windows Vista and Windows XP MCE 2005 editions include:

• Updated "now playing" screen to not update the progress bar as often in full screen mode
• Fixed login text entry on Xbox 360
• Added auto-redirect to mobile pages for mobile devices

Congratations Doug!

[via Missing Remote]

WebGuide 4.1 hasn't officially been released yet, but it keeps getting cool new features. The first beta let you stream DVD video from your media center PC over the web.

The latest beta adds two juicy new features:

1. A Media Center add-in that connects to a WebGuide server and lets you stream your recorded television programs, videos, and DVDs within a media center interface at up to 720p resolution. In other words, you can access your media remotely using an MCE computer or Xbox 360.
2. A new feature called WebGuide Prism that lets you view content from several machines running MCE. If you've got two or three PCs in the house recording programs, you can see them all in one menu using Webguide Prism. This also works if you want to share content over the internet with friends who are also running Windows Media Center.
   

[via the placeshift]

WebGuide 4.1 beta is out, and the popular web-scheduling application for Windows Media Center has a few new features. The biggest one is probably streaming of unencrypted DVDs over the web. By unencrypted, we mean you'll probably have use home movies or other DVD you made yourself into your DVD drive in order for this feature to work.

You can rip the DVD to your hard drive and watch it in a web browser over the internet. As long as Webguide can find a Video_TS folder or mountable ISO image, it will treat it as a DVD with titles, chapters, and menus.

Here's a few of the other updates/improvements:

• Added a "Now Playing" page to mobile section
• Added new streaming profiles
• Added video/DVD streaming to mobile client
• Cleaned up font sizes in mobile pages
• New ability to submit errors for review
• Cleanup of old image cache items after 30 days

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.

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."

The Open Source Windows PC-based Media Portal now has a web interface. That mean's you'll be able to perform a number of basic media center and PVR functions on your PC over the internet using a web browser.

• View your TV guide
• Schedule recordings
• Cancel/delete scheduled recordings
• View recorded programs
• View upcoming recordings.

No support for streaming videos over the net yet, but that could possibly be on deck for a future release.

[via Missing Remote]

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.

Doug Berrett plans to release an update to Webguide 4.0 for Windows Vista. The program already lets you schedule recordings on your home theater PC from any web connected PC or Windows Mobile PDA. But why bother opening a web browser if you don't have to?

The latest update will show your guide, recorded programs and upcoming recordings in a Vista Sidebar Gadget. You can set it up to show the latest info for the PC its installed on, or you can configure the gadget to work with a remote machine, allowing you to keep track of your recordings while you're slacking off at the office.

[via Ian Dixon]

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.