Oh this is a great idea to use as an example!
It would be great if it could keep a tab on what you have listened to and how much of it. For example it would know that you have listened up to 20mins in to the Media Center Show #43 and #44 is waiting for you to listen.
Also displaying the show notes while listening would be good.

Charlie,
Take a look at http://mcerssreader.oabsoftware.nl for some inspiration!

I would love it if you could set videoblog 'channels' and assign specific videoblog feeds to these channels. This would be a sort of 'River of News' type channel. So that you could just go to the channel and it would just start showing the videoblogs as episodes one after the other in a stream.

Ideally I'd like this channel to just be available like any other, but considering how difficult that might be, I'd surely settle for going into this add-in to pick the channel. It would be nice for this channel to pickup where you left off.

Support for MCX, as well. My son watches the Xplay G4 TV stuff. Other MCE RSS plug-ins didn't work well for me partly because they didn't support key video types.

If it could have an option for downloading the enclosures using BITS (i.e. overnight) that would be cool. There's not enough bandwidth here to watch most videoblogs on demand, it always spends more time buffering than actually playing the content.

I would very much like to see playback speed control. That is one of the best features of watching MSDN webcasts and listening to Podcasts on my PC is that I can control the playback speed. It is a great feature of Windows Media Player. I think MSDN / Microsoft Webcasts must have finally gotten enough requests to add it because the earlier versions of the player didn't have speed control and now the Replay skin has a speed control on it.

Have you looked at TVTonic recently? It's in Online Spotlight under TV & Movies. TVTonic is video podcast player that downloads enclosures using BITS. Feed elements are played continuously to render a television like experience. If you return to the service within an hour it resumes where you left off. A composite channel plays elements that are new and we are working on releasing category channels that will pull content from a number of participating blogs covering similar topics. Some of the feeds are provided by us in HD, such as our gaming feed. We support all video formats supported by MCE as well as Quicktime feeds (not an easy feat, but it works well).

We're excited about the possibilities with MCE Vista and have begun exploring a port to MCML. As soon as we get a plugin version working we'll send it your way.

My 10p:

1. Import and export of OPML - ideally through a wizard style interface for import that lets me choose which feeds I want in Media Centre - I might want them all, on the other hand I might just want the ones with media content.

2. Preset channels of feeds - but I can add my own feeds too, and delete the presets that don't interest me EG:

Sports
->Football
->->Manchester United
->->Arsenal
->Cricket
->->England
->->Gloucestershire
Gadgets
->Endgadget
->T3 Magazine

NB It would be really cool to integrate my own TV listings as RSS feeds under each of the above categories, with the feed being the next 24 hours of TV for that channel - I imagine this would be tricky due to localisation of TV networks?

It would be great to have an easy podcast for radio stations that issue podcasts, (and to sync these easily with an ipod...) as these are rapidly taking over from streamed radio.

It would be great to have an easy podcast for radio stations that issue podcasts, (and to sync these easily with an ipod...) as these are rapidly taking over from streamed radio.