Check out the CES 2008 NexGen Home demos in Windows Vista Media Center! There are 6 clips showing every room in the NexGen home.

To get to the demos, open Vista Media Center and scroll to Internet TV beta. Select Tech, then Tech and Gadgets, and there you are!

From Chris Lanier’s Blog:

Anthony Park has just released MyNetflix for Vista Media Center. This incredible MCML plug-in has a host of features including “Watch Now” streaming ability!

Check out Chris Lanier’s Blog for more information and download links. Also, anyone with Netflix, let us know how it works!

[UPDATE] Engadget is reporting that Netflix is looking to making streaming movies to the Xbox available as well! Article here.

Like many of you out there, I haven’t always purchased the very latest technology (OK, I usually wait until it gets cheap). You may have an analog video camera you’re still using because hey, it still WORKS. Or a VCR that you hang on to because you have home movies from your kids’ first Christmas, or wedding tapes. But old tapes can deteriorate, and you may find in any case that you’d like to be able to preserve and store some of these memories, or share them or burn them to DVD if only you could get them onto your Media Center.

In my case, my boyfriend used my VHS-C camcorder to record a local band’s performance, and wanted to be able to give them a DVD of it. “Sure, we can do that!” I said. But it was a little bit more complicated than I expected.

Read the rest of this entry »

Engadget is showing a 1904 Chickering upright grand piano with an integrated 26-inch Philips LCD HDTV and a full-blown Media Center PC. Inquiring minds want to know how good the piano sounds with a Media Center and TV in it–but it’s kind of a cool idea all the same. Read all about it.
Where’s the most interesting place you’d like to install a media center?

Above photo of first gen Zune with new and old software, stolen from Engadget.

Today was the official launch of the new Zunes, AND (more importantly for me) the new Zune software. While I didn’t stay up late (or get up early) like those good folks over at Engadget seem to have done, I did start my download about 3 minutes after my first cup of coffee–because I was excited to see if, as promised, I could download saved programs from Media Center to my Zune with the new software.

The short answer? YES. It works fabulously. The update process for my Zune device and the store was remarkably simple. Once I got my Zune store and my device updated, I took my refreshed device over to a Media Center here and got going.

Once I had identified a show I wanted, all I had to do was drag ‘n’ drop the show into the video section of the Zune store and sync. Voila! No conversion (or at least none outside Zune).

A few notes:

• I updated my Zune on my Windows XP laptop at home; then I updated the store software on the Vista machine at work and connected as a guest.
• I used WebGuide (which I covered a few blog posts back) to search for saved TV on other Media Centers on the network and download it to my local Media Center, which didn’t happen to have any saved shows–thus proving that not only can I get the content onto my Zune, I can also access the content from anywhere with WebGuide.
• I haven’t tried getting a show using the wireless sync yet–but I intend to!