With Windows Vista barely one week past RTM the Windows Media Center team started our first milestone for the next version this week. One of the guiding principles we will use to determine features for vNext is identifying and removing roadblocks which keep people from using Windows Media Center.

One example of this is the new Express Setup you find in 'Diamond'. 'Emerald' and previous versions (version history and codenames) forced the user into a rather lengthy first run setup wizard about 10-14 pages at minimum for most users. By contrast, the new Express Setup in 'Diamond' requires but a single action the first time you launch Windows Media Center before you are instantly able to start using the features.

We would love to hear your thoughts about blocking issues which keep you from fully enjoying Windows Media Center more. Leave comments for the team to read.

Our current hosting provider has us on a shared server which has an IP address blacklisted by several of the anti-spam folks. Yuck. Therefore none of the email sent by this server is getting through to most people. That's not good. It's also gone offline more than I would prefer. But I guess we've gotten enough bang for our buck at $19.95 per month -- but sense those dollars should be able to give us a bit more.

So, I'm on the lookout for a great hosting provider who can provide a solution which supports at least the following in addition to the regular web site hosting...

DASBlog 1.9

Community Server (Personal or Standard Edition)

SQL Server (for Community Server and other stuff)

The sites which would be hosted include...

http://www.retrosight.com, http://blog.retrosight.com, http://www.mediacentersandbox.com, http://blog.mediacentersandbox.com, http://discuss.mediacentersandbox.com and http://play.mediacentersandbox.com.

Please leave your recommendations in the comments, or drop me a line at charlieo@microsoft.com if you are a hosting provider and have a great solution.

(How many of you have parents who believe email exists solely as a big ol' chain letter distribution system? Every once in a while a gem slips through just barely worthy of broader distribution. I got one from my mother this morning which fit the bill. Being from the south, I made a few 'enhancements' to be more relative to today. Enjoy! -- but please do not forward <-- wasted breath.)

It has come to our attention that a few beta copies of Windows Vista Southern Edition RC2 may have accidentally been shipped outside of the south.

If you have one of these, you may need help understanding the commands. Windows Vista Southern Edition may be recognized by the unique opening screen. It reads: Winders Vista, with a background picture of Waylon and Willie superimposed on a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Please also note:

 The Recycle Bin is labeled "Outhouse"
 My Computer is called "This Dern Contraption"
 Dial Up Networking is called "Good Ol' Boys"
 Control Panel is known as "The Dashboard"
 Hard Drive is referred to as "4-Wheel Drive"
 CD and DVDs are "Them little ol' plastic frisbee thangs"
 Instead of an error message, "Duct Tape" pops up.

Changes in Terminology in Windows Vista Southern Edition:

 Cancel............stopdat
 Reset..............try'er agin
 Yes...............yep
 No................nope
 Find..............hunt fer it
 Go to............over yonder
 Back...............back yonder
 Help..............hep me out here
 Stop...............kwitit (WHOA!)
 Start............crank'er up
 Settings..........settins
 Programs.........stuff at duz stuff
 Documents........stuff ah done did

Also note that Windows Vista Southern Edition does not recognize capital letters or punctuation marks.

Some programs that are exclusive to Winders Vista:

 Tiperiter.........a word processing program
 Colerin' Book.................a graphics program
 Cyferin' Mersheen...........calculator
 Outhouse Paper................notepad
 Inner-net....................Internet Explorer 7.0
 Pitchers .......................a graphics viewer
 Bubba Tube....................Windows Media Center

We regret any inconvenience it may have caused. If you received a copy of Windows Vista Southern Edition, you may return it to Microsoft for a replacement version: Windows Vista Home Premium Ultimate Redneck Edition (codenamed 'Hee Haw').

I hope this helps all y'all!

Billy Bob

Get er done!

Just got this from JoeB...

Congrats, everyone, on another terrific milestone for Media Center…   today in his Digital Life keynote, Mike Sievert will announce that Media Center has sold 20 MILLION UNITS.

Wow. Just wow. It's pretty nifty to work on a product which has reached 20 million folks worldwide. Sweet.

I thought this video from on10.net was pretty cool -- check it out: http://on10.net/Blogs/TheShow/6849/

I wonder if you could expand this out to a Windows Media Center client for participation -- I bet execs would absolutely love that type of feature.

In an email conversation with Seth Jayson (see this post) he mentioned one of the 'flies in the ointment' of the XBox 360 media capabilities (including Media Center Extender) compared to the announced Apple iTV was the 'sometimes loud fan in the XBox'.

I've been using the XBox 360 Media Center Extender for a couple of months now and the fan noise has never seemed overbearing to me or my family. I can see where an audiophile who wants absolute silence would not be overjoyed by the fan noise, but then again those folks will spend a lot more than $299 to fuel their quest for sonic perfection.

Curious, I borrowed a decibel meter this evening to see how loud the XBox 360 fans would become during normal use of the XBox 360 as a Media Center Extender. Unfortunately, the lowest measurement of the unit was 50db, making it less than ideal to measure the sound generated at a reasonable, normal distance from the unit (like 10'). According to this Wikipedia entry 50db is the equivalent of a 'quiet restaurant inside'.

Still, I thought the test would be interesting -- so I launched the Media Center Extender on the XBox 360 and kicked off a high definition recorded TV show (Law & Order, a favorite) and let it play for 30 minutes before taking measurements.

Anyone care to guess how close to the XBox 360 and where I had to put the meter to get it to register a continuous 50db...?

I guess you could say this is the audio equivalent of guessing how many M&Ms are in the jar. Leave a comment with your guess.

Meanwhile, I'm going to track down a more sensitive decibel meter.

Mosey on over to Caseys blog post and check this out. I'm convinced Casey can make a Media Center PC do just about anything! This little bit of artificial intelligence is pretty neat...

mobileRecord is an MSN instant messaging bot that allows you to schedule TV recordings on your Media Center Edition PC. you communicate with the bot using Messenger, and the bot communicates with your MCE PC through a client application.

Wow. Just, wow.

Update: After some email exchanges between the two of us Seth slightly clarified his article by adding 'The video is' to the paragraph I excerpt below (change is shown in italics). He still does a fairly poor job of telling the overall story here -- but I'm still working on him.

I'm a big fan of The Motley Fool, so it pains me to some extent to write this, but someone has to, so guess it will be me.

In Apple's Latest Victims, Seth writes the following, speaking of the media playback capabilities of the XBox 360...

"It's capable of streaming media directly from a PC, with one big hitch. The video is only supposed to work with the Media Center OS. This was a ridiculous mistake, in my opinion, because so few Media Center OSes exist out there. It not only should have supported streaming from plain vanilla Windows XP, it should have run more file types."

Wrong. In two places.

First, the XBox 360 works out of the box with any version of Windows XP to Play music and manage playlists and view pictures. In addition, it supports playback of content from portable media player devices (compatible device list here) *including* the Apple iPod (but not FairPlay tracks -- talk to Apple about that ). Seth has a good point about compatibility with more file types, but support for [insert codec here] is largely a matter of return on investment. We also stream more media types with the Media Center Extender features of XBox 360 when you have a Windows Media Center enabled SKU of Windows. In addition to audio and pictures, we have video (WMV, MPEG1, MPEG2) and Recorded TV. Plus all of the media available from partners in Online Spotlight (MTV, NPR, Akimbo to name a few).

Second, there are more than a few Media Center PCs out there: 16 million according to the last group of public numbers. In addition, greater than 50% of the personal computers being sold today come with Windows Media Center. With Windows Vista, we expect the percentage to increase with Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate (the two SKUs with Windows Media Center included).

So, Seth, you could actually forego the iTV even before it ships with a trip to your local retailer. Tonight.

P.S. Isn't it odd Seth owns Microsoft stock and The Motley Fool has it listed as an Inside Value recommendation, but managed to publish this article without basic fact checking? See the links above to the public XBox.com site above which clearly enumerate these features.

P.S. Even more interesting to me is they offer RSS feeds for stories, but no way for me to leave comments about them. That might be because they are offering financial advice, perhaps...?

I recorded this on Sunday night and got around to narrating this evening. Enjoy...

Alexander Grundner: "In respect to iTV, Media Extenders for Windows Media Center and third party digital media adapters have been doing this duty for over two years now. What's so revolutionary (at least these days) about a device that streams videos from your PC to your TV wirelessly?"

Michael Gartenberg: "They key to the announcement is understanding that there's a seamless end to end experience for consumers for consuming digital content both within the home and outside the home."

Om Malik: "In the post-PC, device world, content is what sells the hardware, at least for hardware. More music, more movies, more television means iPod becomes da platform."

Paul Thurrott: "Overall, the iTV looks solid but it's lacking one key feature: DVR. It's literally a dull terminal, albeit one with a gorgeous UI. That doesn't mean that Apple can't add DVR capabilities to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) of course. And you know what? I hope they do. Anyway, so far, so good. It's not the uber-box some people expected, but I'll be first in line to get one."

Robert Scoble: [Addressing Steve Jobs] "Your UI looks an awful lot like Windows Media Center. Almost a total copy. So, who is copying whom? What’s next, a Tablet PC copy?"

Mike Torres: "You know though, Apple is truly at the top of its game these days.  Even more so than a year ago - or 4+ years ago when I bought my first-gen 10GB iPod.  As much as I critique their lock-in model, they never cease to wow me with how much they're able to do, and the innovation and quality bar they set for others.  I applaud them."

Omar Shahine: "If Apple would just support WMA and get HBO to offer their shows for download I'd be set, I'd never consider any other device or audio software for my desktop/laptop (still need Windows Media Center though). Zune better ship soon so that we can get started on v2 and of course v3. Apple has a massive head start and I'm not sure anyone will ever catch up (or that it matters)."

Steve Makofsky: "Looks like it's time to whip out the credit card."

Thomas Hawk: "And then we have iTV. So let's see. I'm going to pay $300 for a little dongle that will allow me the privlige of paying Apple $10-$15 to buy movies from them at less than DVD quality to watch on my new HDTV Plasma? I can just stick with Netflix, pay a heck of a lot less and not have to buy the $300 little dongle thing."

Ed Bott: So, will someone please tell me why I want to replace my Xbox 360 with an Apple-branded device that only plays tunes from one music store, allows me to pay $15 for a movie encoded at 640 by 480 that looks like crap on my widescreen HDTV, and is unable to record or stream TV programming?

My take: Things are becoming mildy interesting at this point. Apple built out the personal content side first and has a very strong position there (iTunes Store + iPod). We built out the home content side first and have a very strong position there (Windows Media Center + XBox 360 Media Center Extender). Apple is making a foray into the home content side (iTV). We are making our foray into the personal content side (Zune). Holiday '08 is shaping up to be very interesting.

So, who is the dark horse none of us are seeing at the moment...?