Yesterday I mentioned Microsoft's propriety video format MS-DVR which is used for Windows Media Center recordings.
Previously you would need to convert the videos to a more standard format using something like DVRBox so you could edit them with ease. However Vista Movie Maker now comes with full support of MS-DVR files so editing out those adverts is now pretty easy.
Check out the Vista-ready OMS-GX300 Media Center from Okoro Media Systems. This beast of a media center will set you back $4,995 but includes some mouth watering specs:
A silver and sleek SilverStone LC18 case which comes with a little 7" Touch Screen display featuring a 15:9 wide display with HDTV transcoder for 720p
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor
2GB of Crucial's Ballistix memory
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card
1TB of hard drive space (2x 500GB) – can be upgraded to 2TB.
16x Dual-Layer +-RW DVD Writer
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX PCIE 768MB HDTV & HDCP
Saber 2020 TV Tuners with hardware MPEG-2 encoder.
PCI Over-The-Air HDTV Tuner
Optional USB HDTV Tuner
Microsoft Media Center Remote Control w/ IR Blaster
Snapstream Firefly Remote Control
You may be thinking this is a little over the top for a Media Center PC unless you want to do gaming. But as CrunchGear points out, a great feature of Vista is that it works seamlessly with the Xbox 360 controller making living room gaming from the couch much more appealing.
The Vista launch has come upon on us and so it's a busy time for a lot of PC related companies. One of which is Hauppauge which has announced that it has the widest range of Vista ready PC tuner cards available.
Hauppauge will now be offering the new Vista driver software with every Hauppauge product shipped from today. Existing customers can upgrade from the Hauppauge website.
If you are keen to read more about the Windows Vista launch then check out Engadget.
OQO, a company that specializes in ultra-mobile personal computing, announced the Model 02 at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.
The Model 02 is an extremely powerful portable mini PC that has the ability to run Windows Vista Ultimate. Kevin Groppe of FloppyHead pointed out that if it can run Windows Vista Ultimate (which comes with MCE) it must therefore be a mini Media Center PC.
Further more the Model 02 comes with USB support so could get hooked up with a USB Digital Tuner turning the Model 02 into a portable mini PVR. Also the Model 02 has a HDMI output so could be hooked up to any HD TV.
Whether this little PC could stand up to the heavy requirements of PVR recording and playing HD content is yet to be seen. But it would damn cool if it could!
DVR-MS is a proprietary Microsoft format that is used in Media Center Edition to record videos. Unfortunately this format can't be played on may other devices so you may want to be able to easily convert your DVR-MS video recordings to some other format..
DVRBox is free open source software that does just that converting your DVR-MS video files into other formats including Xvid and MPEG 4. Features include:
Editing of DVR-MS videos
Batch processing
Automatic crop detection
Scheduled compression
Outputs to MPEG-4 including XviD, x264
In development is manual cropping, directory scanning, profilesand iPod Support.
With the official public release of Vista here, the amount of people using Media Center for their PVR needs is sure to climb to a higher level than it was with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.
As with a lot of the new users, some of us veteran users may have some questions of our own when it comes to doing things with the new OS. Luckily The Green Button has come to our rescue with a Vista MCE FAQ that is floating around in their forums.
At the time of this post the thread has only 7 posts, but within that there are already a few Q&A's listed. I suspect that this thread will grow quite steadily over the next few days, so make sure you check back.
And if you have a question that is not listed there, be sure to register as a member and post it. With all the talent and skill over in that forum, hopefully all questions will be answered, and with that a comprehensive FAQ should emerge.
The Trinion L7 is a well packed Home Theater PC (HTPC) with a nifty 800 x 480 resolution touch-screen LCD monitor that can be controlled by an IR remote. It features easy playback of DVDs, photos, TV episodes etc and can even launch games and office applications from the LCD screen itself.
Features of this sleek looking HTPC include:
A silver chassis
1.66GHz Intel T5500 processor
1GB of DDR2 RAM
250GB hard drive
8-channel onboard audio
Gigabit Ethernet
Combo drive
Windows XP Media Center Edition
Front-panel flash card readers
USB / FireWire connectors
Audio in / out ports
The Trinion L7 should be available in South Korea sometime soon although no release details are available.
Back at the end of October Brad talked about an XML file that could be used within Windows Media Center which would automatically download cover art, descriptions, ratings, cast, etc about any DVD that you may have ripped.
Now although that site has been a huge help in that it saves you from having to create these individual files for each DVD on your system, there were some short comings with the site. Well hopefully most of those have been taken care of.
DVDXML.com has just completed a major overhaul that includes a new, easier to use download section, and a new and improved search engine. However because of the upgrade they are temporarily not accepting new XML files, but that restriction will be lifted in the near future.
If you have a Windows Media Center based PVR and you like to keep your DVD's on your hard drive, be sure to check out this site. It's all the little things like this that make you realize how customizable a do it yourself PVR really can be.
With the upcoming general public release of Windows Vista just around the corner there has been a lot of talk about the new Media Center features it brings with it, as well as its limitations (i.e. DRM).
One of the biggest offerings though is its ability to recognize and use CableCard technology. Although this improvement has been widely touted by Microsoft, we haven't heard a whole lot from manufacturer's in the way of implementation, until now.
Vidabox, the makers of various Media Center powered HTPC systems, announced this morning that they will be introducing new systems which support dual tuner digital cable receivers via CableCards. This is great news for anyone who wants to start recording HD channels without the hassle of trying to get a cable box working with Media Center.
Other improvements to the line include the addition of Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives and the option to add more than 3TB of storage via RAID-5. Also noted in the press release is the ability to stream HD content recorded via CableCard to an Xbox 360 (and presumably to other next-generation media extenders).
Dean Takahashi of the Mercury News has put together one of those "xx reasons" type of lists, this time about the forthcoming Windows Vista.
The launch of Vista (for consumers) is only a few days away, and already the hype machine is working its magic.
Chief among Dean's reasons for getting a hold of Windows Vista is the fairly obvious one for me: #5 Vista has a built-in version of the Windows Media Center user interface.
However, I'm not so sure that "when you move your mouse over the borders, you'll find they're a little thicker so it isn't as hard to grab them and expand the size of a window" is a sufficiently good reason to go out and spend the money on an upgrade so early in the day.
Less than two weeks until Windows Vista comes out, and my computer up and dies on me. At first I thought it was the power supply, but it's not. It could be the CPU, the motherboard, anything really.
Well, I'd put a lot of money into my last computer which served double duty as my work machine and my PVR (since I write about PVRs, I guess it was really just my work machine). Anyway, it had a couple of hard drives, all of which survived intact, a couple of TV tuners, and an NVIDIA graphics card with a TV-out.
I decided the easiest thing to do would be go and find a sale at a nearby electronics shop, pick up a computer for under $500, and slap all of my old goodies inside. So far so good. But here's the thing. The new system came with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, and in a few weeks I'll qualify for a free upgrade to Windows Vista.
But one of the first things I did was disable the Media Center services from launching at startup so that I can reinstall BeyondTV and restore my scheduled recordings from a backup file. I've got hundreds of hours of programs that I've recorded in BeyondTV. They have smartchapters, a BeyondTV feature that makes it easy to see where the commercials are and skip them with one click. It doesn't always work perfectly, but it's better than a thirty second skip when it does work.
I've showsqueezed most of my recordings (a fancy word for compressing them to WMV or DivX files) so that I could fit more programs on my hard drive. And some of them have strange resolutions that really look best when played back in BeyondTV.
So I decided to stick with the software that I've been using. But is it silly of me not to treat this as an opportunity to play with MCE, and to have all the benefits that come with having a PVR that's integrated with my operating system? That said, I'm also going out of town for a week soon and it'd be nice if I know my PVR is set up and ready to record all my episodes of 24, Heroes, and Battlestar Galactica while I'm gone.
With Microsoft Vista set to officially launch in a couple of weeks, Microsoft has begun adding content to the Online Media section of Vista Media Center.
The Online Media function provides online content to Media Center users in the same interface they use to view their personal media such as television recordings and music collections. Some of the new content includes clips from the Discovery Channel, Yahoo video, VH1, Napster, and other music services, and access to MovieLink video purchases and downloads.
While Media Center functions are included in several versions of Vista, most computers still aren't sold with TV tuners, so I imagine online content is sort of a selling point for using a Vista PC as a digital hub in the living room.
I've never had the pleasure of trying out any of Evesham's offerings in the PC market, but they seem to get fairly decent reviews.
PC Plus has a review of the most recent tower of of the blocks from the Evesham labs, a Vista MCE PC, no less -- which features a low-end case housing a Core 2 Duo processor and a paltry 1GB of RAM.
However, it also has a 250GB hard drive and a 19in widescreen display, a TV tuner and a TV-out graphics card, which all mounted up to some fairly decent bench-test results (although, games fared poorly).
The big advice I seem to be picking up from an upgrade of Vista, let alone the MCE editions, is to get yourself a beefy graphics card, or suffer the consequences.
At the CES last year it was announced that DirecTV and Microsoft were working together to link up DirecTV and Microsoft entertainment devices such as the Xbox 360 and MCE PCs.
Many believed that this would mean you would be able to have an installer come out and install a DirecTV tuner into your Media Center PC and get your local cable channels complete with PVR functionality. In other words your Media Center PC is your DirecTV set top box.
From a May interview on Engadget a Microsoft representative said "you can get essentially a receiver device that is a DirecTV receiver and connect it through some digital connection to your PC. [Doing so] lets you get all the great value from the DirecTV service, including High-Definition. If you subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket, you'll be able to get that. All that good stuff."
According to DBSTalk from a quick Q&A session with DIRECTV at CES last week, the HTPC DirecTV Cards are still in progress and in internal beta testing.
However I still think it will be some time before this is released otherwise we would have heard a little more coming out of the CES camp last week. I'd expect the very earliest we'll see this is the middle of this year.
I'll admit it. When I first heard about Windows Vista's new Sideshow capabilities, I wasn't that impressed. Great, so you can access some PC functions without turning your computer on. That's fine for notebook users who don't want to take the time to boot up their system, but if you've got a PC-based PVR your system's probably on all the time anyway, and you can access it with your remote control almost as quickly as you could press a button on a Sideshow device.
And then I started to see pictures of Sideshow-enabled remote controls. And I'm a convert. Having complete access to the program guide on your remote control? Brilliant. Sure, on-screen program guides have gotten better and better, but if you've ever tried to browse through program descriptions to set up new recordings while your spouse is sitting next to you and trying to watch TV, you'll get the appeal of being able to do everything from the remote control.
Check out the Vista-ready OMS-GX300 Media Center from Okoro Media Systems. This beast of a media center will set you back $4,995 but includes some mouth watering specs:
The Vista launch has come upon on us and so it's a busy time for a lot of PC related companies. One of which is Hauppauge which has announced that it has the widest range of Vista ready PC tuner cards available.
With the official public release of Vista here, the amount of people using Media Center for their PVR needs is sure to climb to a higher level than it was with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. 
Back at the end of October Brad talked about an XML file that could be used within Windows Media Center which would automatically download cover art, descriptions, ratings, cast, etc about any DVD that you may have ripped.
With the upcoming general public release of Windows Vista just around the corner there has been a lot of talk about the new Media Center features it brings with it, as well as its limitations (i.e. DRM). 
I've never had the pleasure of trying out any of Evesham's offerings in the PC market, but they seem to get fairly decent reviews.
At the CES last year it was announced that DirecTV and Microsoft were working together to link up DirecTV and Microsoft entertainment devices such as the Xbox 360 and MCE PCs.
