Another day, another post from Steven Sinofsky on the Building Windows 8 blog. For the second day in a row Sinofsky has touched on a subject that I think Media Center enthusiasts might want to be paying attention to as the steady march toward Windows 8 continues. For today’s blog post Sinofsky has kicked off the first of four major […]
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Steven Sinofsky and the Windows development team recently launched their development blog, Building Windows 8. Every entry has proven to be interesting reading, but today’s entry touched on the new element that most interests me as an HTPC enthusiast: the new Metro-inspired Start screen. The tile-based Start screen is being designed to work with touch, mouse, or keyboard and immediately stood […]
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Microsoft continues to focus its living room aspirations on the Xbox 360. For a long time, one insurmountable advantage that Windows Media Center held over the Xbox 360 was access to live sports content. The addition of the ESPN3 app to Xbox Live changed that, and now the Xbox’s ESPN3 app is getting an update that might just convince me to […]
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Vizio recently released their first Android tablet, and now Vizio has the first Android tablet that can access Hulu Plus.The fact that the Vizio Tablet runs Gingerbread instead of the tablet-focused Honeycomb probably helped. There are a number of Gingerbread-based smartphones running Hulu Plus already, requiring the Hulu app developers to expend relativly little effort tweaking the app and certifying the device. Vizio has […]
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Word first got over the weekend that Microsoft was prepping the first Update Rollup for Windows Home Server 2011, and sure enough, it is now available. The update includes a number of bug fixes and one new feature. Unfortunately, the new feature is exceedingly minor. The “Getting Started” tasks on the Dashboard home page will now include a reminder to […]
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SecondRun.tv received an update over the weekend, bringing one of the more ambitious Windows Media Center plugins in recent memory up to version 2.6. The new features enhance the Movie and TV Show Views that were added with the 2.5 release and focus on improving and expanding the search funtionality built into SecondRun.tv. The most obvious change is the new optional […]
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When the orginal Mac Mini was announced back in 2005, it immediately became my model of what an HTPC should look like. I’ve completed two HTPC upgrades since then, and each time I have tried my darndest to justify the extra expense to go with a Mac Mini instead of my usual homebrew. Not as fun, but way sexy. This year’s models […]
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The Roku 2 has not been a secret for a while now thanks to the FCC, but it would appear that it is now completely in the open. Roku has finally made the official announcement about their new lineup of media streamers. The new Roku boxes are not major upgrades, but do bring some interesting new features and some new […]
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I have never been a huge YouTube user, but every so often I come across something worth checking out and sharing with the family. For general YouTube browsing in Windows Media Center, I have generally relied on MacroTube, but one feature it lacks is the ability to login into your Google account and access your Watch Later playlist. I recently upgraded our […]
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I recently attended a conference where one of the more exciting sessions I sat in on was a demonstration of the Kinect for Windows SDK. The applications being discussed in this demo were in no way Windows Media Center related, but it did occur to me at one point that would be a neat use for Kinect. Evidently I was not the […]
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