Rags Gupta (who was instrumental in bringing Live365 to Online Spotlight back in the day -- how ya doin' Rags!) writes the following in DVR Feature Request - One-Click to Record Future Programs...

"I'd like to be able to click a "Remember to Record" button while the ad is playing or within some time lag after it plays and have my DVR put the advertised show on its recording schedule."

I want this too, Rags. Just the other day my wife saw an advertisement for Conviction, the new court room drama from the Law & Order folks. We went looking for it in the Media Center Electronic Programming Guide (EPG) and it wasn't there because the first episode was outside the 14 day window. Now I have to remember to go looking for it at some point in the future.

Oh, and clearly there is an advertising bonus here -- imagine being able to track how many people have scheduled a DVR recording of a show in advance, then publicize the following with a movie trailer voice over...

'Over XX million viewers will be recording this show in two weeks -- will you...?'

Great idea Rags!

Things have been super busy the last couple of weeks...

Schematic is doing the design for the 'Q' application and will collaborate with our team to implement the visuals using Media Center Markup Language. Kate Wojogbe and Peng Lee will be co-presenting with us at Mix06 at the 'Design' and 'Developer' sessions respectively. I'm super excited they get to come out from 'behind the scenes' to showcase their talent -- many of the best applications in Online Spotlight exist as a result of their great work. They sent over the design concepts for 'Q' this evening. Impressive, to say the least. I'll post the designs once we tweak them a bit more.

Stephen Toub is also joining us on the project, focusing on the managed code side of the equation. Stephen is freakin' brilliant, and can communicate his brilliance to dolts like myself via his wonderful articles and resources like Fun with DVR-MS, Time Travel with Media Center and DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning. The best thing about what Stephen writes: it's fundamentally usable by developers and consumers.

The developer of Galleon, one of the more popular TiVO Home Media Engine (HME) applications has decided to cut back on the amount of time he spends on continued development...

"So, I’m sad to announce that I’ve decided to reduce my development efforts on the project. I might still release some bug fixes, but these won’t be as frequent as the releases in the past. I also don’t have any plans on adding any additional functionality to Galleon. I’ve decided to rather spend my time on other interesting technologies and open source projects."

I wonder if he is looking at the Media Center platform as one of the other interesting technologies? We are always looking for talented folks to poke and prod our SDK and APIs.

I certainly understand what TiVO is going through with it's platform -- it's tough supporting the enthusiast developer -- as our platform grows in popularity I find it harder to spend time in the enthusiast community. Luckily, folks out there do take the time to ping me and remind me to check in more often.

I sincerely hope TiVO can get back on track with it's platform momentum -- it helps all of us raise awareness of the opportunities with a digital home.

I sat down with a piece of graph paper at McDonalds today for lunch (Value Meal #2 which is a Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese sans onions, fries, Coca-Cola, plus three chocolate chip cookies) to sketch out the Mix06 project.

I named the app 'Q' until we can come up with something better. It can stand for a couple of things which seem to be appropriate: cue and queue.

Here is a sneak preview of the feature set / goals along with priority.

• Browse potential and subscribed content. (p1)
• Subscribe to content. (p1)
• Download content to local machine. (p1)
• Play content from local machine. (p1)
• Support RSS 2.0 required Channel elements. (p1)
   Title, Link, Description
• Support RSS 2.0 required Item element. (p1)
   Title (or Description)
• Support RSS 2.0 Item optional elements required for app to function. (p1)
   Enclosure (+ 3 required attributes of location, size and mime type).
   GUID (unique string for feed)

• Support optional elements of RSS 2.0 Channel. (p2)
   Language, copyright, image (+ 3 required elements of url, title and link), category
• Support optional elements of RSS 2.0 Item. (p2)
   Description, author, category, pubDate

• Manage subscriptions. (p3)
• Support Media Center native formats for playback: WMA, MP3, WMV, MPEG1, MPEG2 (p3)
   We get this for free, but I'm spelling it out anyway so we know specifically what formats will be supported.

Priority Legend

p1 = Must Have
p2 = Nice To Have
p3 = Cool if we get, but won't go above and beyond to implement.

There will be some expansion of these features once we start getting into the UI design -- for example, browse will probably include some notion of grouping / categorization. I hope to publish the full spec before the end of the week.

Keep the comments / feature requests coming -- we haven't locked anything down yet so there is still time to add or change features.

Well, it's time to get started on the project we want to demo at Mix06. We are going to put together a podcast / videoblog client for Media Center written as a Media Center Add In with the user interface coded in Media Center Markup Language (MCML).  Chances are this puppy will be released 'out into the wild' at some point.

What favorite features do you want us to include?

Copied over the FlexWiki files, created a subdomain and Bam!

http://wiki.mediacentersandbox.com

[Update] Well, easy to get running -- still have a few configuration files to put in place / edit to actually make the wiki work. Hopefully up and running tomorrow.

Jason Baumeister over at SnapStream Blog announced the other day they have opened up a Wiki for the Beyond Media platform. Check it out over at http://code.snapstream.com.

Which begs the question why don't we have one for Media Center?

Good question.

Our team has been using a wiki internally as a collaboration tool for work on the Windows Media Center Presentation Layer and Media Center Markup Language. I've been pondering whether or not to create one externally, weighing the pros and cons. For example...

Reason Not To: We already have some great enthusiast sites like TheGreenButton.com where developers hang out.

Reply: It's wonderful for discussion, not as efficient for fact finding. You must search, and sometimes dig through lots of posts to find an answer.

Reason Not To: We have a newsgroup for free technical support.

Reply: To be honest, I'm not thrilled with the web interface nor Outlook Express for interacting with our newsgroups. And again, they aren't great for fact finding.

Reason Not To: We try to get everything you need into the Software Development Kit itself.

Reply: Yes, but we can't update that puppy in real time, and folks external to Microsoft have a hard time contributing except during beta or direct partnership with us.

Reason Not To: Do you really want to add another item to your plate?

Reply: What item? This should be a 'set it and forget it' activity where the community, not you, drives the content. Trust them.

...and so on. Typical, big, slow company thinking. Has blogging taught me nothing?!?!?

So, it's time to stop debating inside my head and create a wiki for the Media Center platform.

There will invariably be folks saying we are being copycats. They would be right. I (eventually) know a good thing when I see it.

Seriously, kudos to you, SnapStream, for creating a wiki for your platform. I hope you will see our imitation as the sincerest form of flattery.

I was walking by Michael Creasy's office late last week and noticed he was handling email on a Windows Vista machine. He said it was running pretty reliably, and could go about three days without needing a reboot. That's fairly good considering he wasn't running a build which had been vetted for public consumption like a Community Technology Preview -- just one of the latest builds, which can sometimes be a crapshoot.

So, I'm going to install it right now on my lifeblood Toshiba M200 Tablet PC -- the one I depend on daily. I run a ton of beta software on other machines at work, but keep this one 'sacred' running only released (non-beta) software so I can be assured of not being blocked from getting something done.

I'll admit, I'm a bit apprehensive about the impact this will have on my productivity.

What tipped the scales...?

I was on an email thread with a Microsoft VP the other day and his signature read 'Sent from Windows Vista CTP'. Seriously, if my bosses' bosses' bosses' bosses' boss can tough it out, so can (should) I.

I just presented to some friends on the Movie Maker team. Anybody out here who would be interested in hearing from them? Leave a comment.

Posted over on Media Center Sandbox: http://blog.mediacentersandbox.com/PermaLink,guid,9c4e4630-5e10-4177-8bab-b30adc28dce1.aspx

I wish I had seen this sooner (my apologies -- if you see this kind of cool stuff, drop me an email directly). Kudos to Colin for putting together GMAPMCE whereby you can browse Google Maps from the comfort of your couch. This is more addictive than I thought. This post explains how to get it available from More Programs in Media Center.

Anyone created one of these for http://local.live.com yet...?

Update: Yes, someone did and I feel just horrible I didn't pick up on it from Ian Dixon (to whom I susbcribe). Sean Mcleod put together an app which can be correlated with your geo-tagged pictures from the My Pictures feature in Media Center. Sweet. The app and details (including some source 'how to' snippets) can be found at Virtual Earth Media Center Add-in (The Code Project). Sean hasn't posted since November 10 -- hope everything is all right.

http://spaces.msn.com/members/manodesign/Blog/cns!1pRsSVBaAuwgFSti-clSJ6Ng!362.entry

I had the good fortune of attending the launch party for Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's book 'Naked Conversations' (the venue was absolutely spectacular). What a blast -- I was able to meet many folks I either subscribe to in Newsgator or will starting tonight. I always find it refreshing to hang out with others from the blogosphere, and verbally converse with the people behind the keyboard and wifi.

My apologies in advance for the shameless name dropping here. I thought I would share some of the things I learned tonight (in the order I learned them).

Frank Shaw goes out of his way to use Microsoft beta software. Frank is Executive Vice President at Waggener Edstrom, the company which helps Microsoft handle public relations. My view of PR folks totally changed tonight after speaking with Frank. Before tonight I largely viewed our PR folks as spinmeisters. Frank showed me they can be just as bought in to the vision as me. Refreshing. Robert is right -- he should start a blog.

Stephen Toulouse (his personal blog is here) always has a tough crowd whenever he walks into a meeting at Microsoft. You see, he is part of the Microsoft Security Response Center. When he walks in, pretty much all the oxygen gets sucked out of the room because he might be delivering bad news on the security front (although, increasingly his news is good news). He also works for a team which seemingly gets tons of flaming arrows shot at them on a daily basis from all fronts. I could tell he was passionate about making sure consumers felt confident in our products on the security front.

Chris Pirillo reminded me again (in his usual low key, non-passionate, laissez-faire, introverted, quiet conversational style) our products simply have to work for customers. In my opinion, every product group should bring him in to spend just 15 minutes on an alpha quality product -- you will get more good nuggets of actionable feedback (and expletives) in that amount of time than in 4 weeks of usability studies. I also learned Media Center is already more complex than it needs to be, and many wonderful features are undiscoverable, even for bright geeks like Chris. We gotta work on that now and as our features grow.

My next TabletPC might very well be an OQO Model 01+ -- Moshen Chan from OQO was walking around with one and letting folks play. Hooked. I wish my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC wasn't so well made so I would have an excuse to get this puppy right now. If someone there knows the young man from OQO, please let me know so I can give him props. Want to get people to join the conversation? Have a cool piece of hardware in your hands and pass it around.

The mobile space is HOT. Vikram Dendi showed me his tricked out Windows Mobile 5.0 Smart Phone. I'm hoping he will take some time in the next couple of weeks to help me trick out my new i-Mate K-JAM (aka HTC Wizard / QTEK 9100). Actually, I've never seen so many Smart Phones in one place -- I think they erected a new cell tower outside while we were there to handle the volume. Robert and Chris had a ScoblePhone v2 (aka Cingular 2125 / HTC Faraday).

If there is another team at Microsoft as interesting to me as Media Center it has to be Jeff Sandquist's (I mean, seriously, Channel9 + Robert Scoble + Duncan Mackenzie for starters -- 'nuff said). We had the briefest of conversations this evening, but as usual, new things are brewing. It's always something new on Jeff's team -- those guys have way too much fun (if there is such a thing).

Buzz Bruggeman gave me perhaps the best elevator pitch I've heard in the past year. I've heard about ActiveWords for some time now, but have never gotten around to investigate what it is, what it does or how it can help me. So I asked Buzz. His response: "It's software which speaks your language. Install ActiveWords, type or write CNN and boom! you're at CNN." Sold. I've got to work on my elevator pitch for Media Center so it can be this compelling. One word of advice, Buzz -- get the ActiveWords installer digitally signed. Right now it states 'Unknown Publisher' which is typically a show stopper for me, but I'm installing anyway since you did such a good job of convincing me with only two sentences.

And finally, I've got a Robert Scoble autographed copy of Naked Conversations. What did he write...?

"Charlie, Keep the world blogging about Media Center? Thanks & Enjoy, Robert Scoble"

Classy. Thanks again, Robert, for inspiring me.

And by the way, the book has to be good. They weren't giving away copies to be signed as might be expected (Microsoft gives away free swag at these types of events all the time). We had to pay for our copies like anyone else -- that speaks volumes about the value of the content. I'm starting the first chapter tonight.