Better integration of the TV with Windows Vista

photo by onion83

In my previous post about better TV integration I talked about starting to use mythTV. This plan has't been cancelled, but I pushed it a bit further to the future. Why? I wanted to test Vista on my media PC, after I received a copy at the launch last week. (Thank you MS)

I had never used XP media center edition, so this may be old news to XP MCE users, but damn, the Xbox 360 and Vista are really good friends. Just put them on the same network, they kiss and hug et voila, the media center extender does the rest. Watch every piece of media on your network on the TV set, in a slick interface. I've not used Vista in my day to day life yet; currently it's only my media extender. I can't say anything about how it is to work with Vista. But it does seem that Vista has the glue to make every piece of technology work together (that is, every piece of Microsoft technology, naturally).

I still have some minor problems / remarks, though :

• Video codecs: I'm still looking for some decent codecs for Vista. I've found a package called Vista Codec Package, but not every video format seems to be working as yet. Anybody any ideas?
• There's a section in the media center interface called "online media". COOL, IPTV. Guess again, this is not yet available in Belgium. This section is empty. I can't really understand this, we have something nice called the internet, a global network, so why can't we get the same content as American users ? The whole IPTV story gets a lot less interesting if you're still limited to the same local constraints as with regular cable TV.
• Who will be able to provide content? Microsoft partners only ?
• Can I add a media RSS feed to the Media Center? (youtube stream, flickr photos, podcast, rss-2-torrent, ...)
• Is it easy to develop extensions for the Windows Media Center?

Next step for me is buying a TV tuner card and checking how the TV recordings work. It would be pretty cool if I could stream cable TV over my wireless network (think watching football on my terrace) with the media center extender.

photo by whalesalad

Anyway, I never expected smooth integration like this. I'm pretty positive about Vista. But I only tested one aspect of it. I can't really say what it's like to work with Vista every day.