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, …

Back for the first week of March and while news is slow, we’ve decided to take a look at some of the great plugins that are available both within the 10 foot interface, and that simply compliment Media Center.  Whether we’re talking about metadata retrieval, content management or adding new functions, the apps we cover during this show are just a sample of what’s out there.  You’ll find links to all the applications we discuss right below.
We didn’t have a whole lot of email this week and we’re hoping …

There are many methods for getting content from optical discs into Media Center. Some are more complicated than others, some are more reliable. There’s even been previous posts on this site about this same topic. This is a story about my attempts, and what I found worked and didn’t work. I’m going to write it in a way that I hope will make it easy to follow.
Couple things to lead off with: First, this is not the only method, just the one that worked for me. Second, it’s not perfect, …

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 …

We’re back again folks and Josh made sure that it would be a rousing episode.  We of course take time to go through all the the listener email this week and we thank all of you.
Josh’s Hockey Minute returns this week and we find out that if you stopped watching hockey four years ago because of the strike, you should probably start again!
Both VMC with TV Pack and Windows 7 Media Center received updates this week and we’ve got you covered on what’s included.  Not really a whole lot …

Once again we return as ready as ever to answer your questions and mull the intricacies of Media Center.  We had a lot of fun on this week’s show and got some good information out to you, our listeners.
First up this week is Boxee and Windows Media Center Integration 1.0.  A new tool, this app will place a tile in Media Center linked to Boxee and through magic in the background will close Media Center and open Boxee when selected.  It does the process in reverse once you’re ready …

You read that right.  Slamingest is now a word.  So much so that I’ve added it to the dictionary so that it doesn’t get that red squiggly line under it.  I might have coined it, but after listening to our show, you’ll know that it’s James Montemagno who’s made it famous.  James is the owner of RevoHTPC.com and he’s joined us this week to share his experiences with the Acer AspireRevo PC he uses as his Media Center.  I’ve been curious about the Revo for a long time and …

Some times you just want to keep things simple or gasp keep it “Apple” like. That is the case with this nice little gem of a find. A user over at Life Hacker found out that with a simple registry edit you can use alternative IR remote controls within Media Center and even Windows Media Player.
A while back I documented on how you can have two media center PC’s in the same room by editing the IR registry settings on one of the Media Center PC’s so that you could …

The big show returns this week with discussions on whether or not SD content is even worth it!  I personally can’t imagine it but some people out there will skip content just because it’s not HD.  Josh and I take time to clear out our opinions on the subject.
We also go right through the news of the week.  It was a bigger news week than we’ve had lately.  S1 Digital has released a 100 disk Blu-ray changer that integrates with either Windows Media Center PCs or Windows Home Servers.  …

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 …