It’s been a long time since I can remember the Windows Media Center community being excited about a piece of hardware as it has about the Ceton quad CableCard tuner. The card was given an official release date of March 31st at CES. Unfortunately Ceton released a newsletter today with bad news in regards to the release date, but also with some good news.
Getting straight to the bad news, Ceton has pushed the release date to May 31st. No specific reasons were given for the delay.
There isn’t any single reason, …

Home Theater PCs (HTPC) offer a world of endless possibilities if you are willing to invest the time to get the settings the way you like them. Most people who are reading this now are the “tweakers.”.
We add logos to our guides, we change the colors of the backgrounds, we configure options and add-ons to make our experience more enjoyable.
That is unless you have the typical spouse who wants it to work, and when it does wonders why you had to “fix something that just wasn’t broken”.
I will go on …

It’s no surprise to any of our regular readers how much I love Window 7 Media Center. That passion has probably crossed the line into obsession now though. If you’re like me, and for the sake of humanity, let’s hope not, you want to constantly know what your Media Center is doing. That’s where Ian Dixon’s (a fellow Media Center MVP) wonderful Media Center Health Monitor comes in.
Simply register for an account over at http://health.thedigitallifestyle.com, download the software, and you’ll be tracking the status of your Media Center to your …

Recently Brent Evans had the opportunity to talk with Avermedia about their upcoming USB HD DVR. The new device, which will be shipping in April for $199.99, is set to compete with the Hauppauge HD-PVR. It is an analog HD capture device. This means that it accepts a component video input signal and then transfers that to your computer via USB. The main differences between this and the Hauppauge card are that this device does not include digital audio inputs, but it does have HDMI out for direct pass-through access …

Today S1Digital officially released a USB 100 Blu-ray disc changer for use with Windows Media Center. The device can be hooked up directly to your Windows Media Center PC (Vista or Windows 7) or a Windows Home Server. The movies on those discs will then be immediately accessible from within any Media Center using the included My Movies software. The cover art and metadata for the movies is automatically downloaded when using this new device. It can also be used to rip your movie collection to a hard drive without the hassle …

Boxee has already shown that they can bring premium content into their platform.  While MLB TV isn’t something I watch personally, it’s a popular service for the young startup and Boxee is not looking to add even more.
Today through their blog, the Boxee team announced Boxee Payments.  The system, which they say will launch this summer, will allow content providers to offer pay-per-view or subscription services to users with one click inside the application.  The content offered would be entirely up to the provider as would the model they …

Getting as much content as possible into our HTPCs is important.  It provides choice and choice is what everyone wants.  To be able to watch anything at anytime.  With a lot of the focus on video content, we sometimes forget that Media Center has a great music library.  Unfortunately, while Microsoft has added Internet TV and Netflix to the mix, they’ve only concerned themselves with local audio playback up to this point.
In steps Songler.  Originally titled SpotifyMCE, the app would pull in your Spotify account and allow you to …

We all love watching television on our Media Center computers, but what if you have more than one computer around your house? The only solutions up to this point have been to install tv tuner cards into every machine or to use a networked tuner like the HD Homerun. DVBLink is changing all of that though. Today they released a beta of their Server Network Pack and Network Client software.
With DVBLinks new software you simply install the server software on the machine that has the tuner cards in it, and …

Yesterday Ben Drawbaugh and I got into it a little back and forth on Twitter about the HTPC and using it as a HTPC directly connected to your display. Whether that is your tv, your projector or some other display medium or in the case of Ben using your HTPC more as a server in a closet up and out of the way basically running as a headless unit serving up extenders.
Back in July Ben and myself joined Josh (the other Josh) and Adam on Entertainment 2.0 Episode 37 part …

If you spend any time at all with Windows Media Center one of the things you’ll want to eventually do is rip your movie collection to Media Center. You would probably head over to The Green Button for suggestions on the best approach. You would very quickly see that there are more options and methods for this than can possibly be covered in a single blog post. Instead I’m going to detail how I’ve chosen to rip my DVD collection. This post won’t cover Blurays as I don’t even …