Windows Media Center comes with an integrated TV Guide (unfortunately not available in all countries) which brings together listings from all of the channels your PC’s TV Tuner can receive, with the ability to filter specific types of show – News, Films, Sports, Kids’ TV and so on. Compared to pretty much all of the set-top box EPGs I’ve used here in the UK (and there have been a few!) it’s superb.

But, thanks to a small app called My Channel Logos, it can be made even cooler.  My Channel Logos does one thing, and one thing only. It downloads and installs logos for each of the channels available in your TV Guide. Nice and simple.

You can choose from monochrome or full colour logos, set the application to automatically update logos when new versions are available, and… that’s about it. But it certainly adds a that final bit of polish to Media Center's awesome TV experience and is available for free (or for a highly recommended developer donation, if you can spare it).

That’s actually a piece of work. Internet TV is hugely fragmented. Sure, the Hulus and Netflixes of the world do their best to collate it, but they only have the rights to so much – the networks themselves love to stream their programming on their own online services, which is fair enough. So, you’re jumping from website to website, service to service, RSS feed to video podcast (do people still use the word “vodcast”?) to find something you like. You spend more time browsing, and less time viewing and that’s not how TV works, right?

With TV, you have a guide, you flick up and down, you spot a re-run of Police Squad, and you’re set. Why can’t someone pull everything together into one guide, or help me do it for myself?

The answer, dear Niners, has arrived and it’s called SecondRun.tv.

SecondRun.tv is a plugin for Windows Media Center (just released in all-new v2.0 form) that pulls a huge variety of Internet TV programming into the familiar guide format, with channels listed down the left hand side of the screen and programming stretched out horizontally. The really cool thng about the plugin is that it aggregates programming from so many different sources – you want to add CBS’ online stream from the web? No problem. How about Hulu and Netflix channels? Covered. Okay, now try an RSS feed from Revision 3. Got that. Sources are colour-coded in the guide if you need to know where a channel comes from, but otherwise, SecondRun.tv is pretty much agnostic.

The plugin ships with a channel builder app which allows you to define the channels you wish to see and how they’re laid out. You can also submit and download channels from SecondRun.tv’s own channel repository, making it nice and easy to build a personal library of your favourite content. Want a 24/7 rotation of Spongebob Squarepants? Go build yourself a Spongebob channel, which plays episodes at random.

SecondRun.tv looks set to make cutting that cord a whole lot easier. 

Wouldn’t it be great if this need to continually converse with the TV could be put to good use?  Perhaps Amulet’s new voice controlled remote for Windows Media Center could be the answer? It has a built in microphone which relays your commands over to the PC to control your entertainment. You can select the TV channels you want to watch (“Watch NBC”), or Music to play ("Play U2”), ask the remote what song is playing and get an audio response, and even set TV Programmes to record (“Record ABC Next Tuesday at 7 PM”) all through natural language.

According to the company, the remote can sense when you’re talking to it, rather than chatting with friends and family, but don’t worry, it won’t feel ignored. Pick the remote up, it listens, lower it, and it stops – simple.

Amulet Remote Voice Remote for Media Center works with Windows 7 and Windows Vista Media Center and is shipping now. For more, check out Ian Dixon’s unboxing and review over on You Tube.

The nation’s aerial engineers are out in force, and of course, the big box retailers are rubbing their hands at the prospect of all of those set top box sales. But, one of the real consumer benefits of the digital switchover is the launch of Freeview HD, the UK’s first free OTA (over the air) high definition TV service.

I’ve just spent a short break down in Cornwall with the family for a week’s break – this was of the first regions to get the new service. Pick up a new set top box, and you’ll get BBC HD (with all of those incredible nature documentaries like Planet Earth) awful talent & reality TV shows from ITV HD as well as a host of high definition US programming from Channel 4 HD.

That’s all well and good, but what about when you're out on the road? A few weeks ago, PCTV Systems announced the first Freeview HD USB tuner, allowing you to receive high definition OTA programmes on your PC.

The PCTV nanostick T2 290e is a small USB tuner that decodes Freeview HD (and other DVB-T2 services) at 720p – not the maximum resolution available, but good enough for crystal clear TV. It works with the company’s forthcoming TV Center 6 software, which not only acts as a DVR, but can pump out live and recorded TV to your smartphone, via PCTV’s DistanTV service. The nanostick T2 290e is shipping this month, so free HDTV on your PC isn’t too far away.

We store all of our music, video and photos on Windows Home Server. You can buy a range of different servers off the shelf from Lenovo, HP, Acer and others, but I built our own 4-bay, 8TB server as a weekend project. It installs on the network with a quick wizard, and as well as providing a huge amount of network storage for our digital stuff, also backs up our home PCs every night using an image-based backup feature which can subsequently restore an entire PC in 15 mins. It’s very cool.

Windows Home Server works neatly with Windows 7 PCs, automatically configuring your Music, Video and Photo libraries with content from your home server’s shared folders. Open up Windows Media Center, and it’ll spot you have a home server on the network. That opens up a few more cool features – of course, all of your music, video and photos are waiting for you to play in Media Center, but there’s more. TV recorded by Media Center will be automatically copied to a Recorded TV share on your home server, where it’s accessible to any PC on the network, and ensures your Media Center doesn’t get glooped up with hours of video. Want to play back a programme? Go to Recorded TV and Media Center, and all of your TV is presented, as if it’s on the Media Center itself. But in truth, it’s tucked away safely on your home server and will stream with a button press.

You can check out how much storage is available on your home server at any time through a natty pie chart in Media Center, and manage which programmes to keep or delete in the usual way. But if you’re on the move a lot, you’ll really love the combo’s final trick – record TV on Media Center in high or standard definition, and as well as syncing the recording with your home server, you can automatically create compressed copies of your TV programmes at lower resolution for use on a Zune HD or other mobile device. So you’ll have two copies of your TV programmes on the home server – one for watching back on the big screen, and a second that’ll look great on your mobile device.

Check out this walkthrough on the Windows Home Server team blog to find out how it all works, and if you’re looking for a cool project for the weekend, setting up the almighty Windows Media Center + Windows Home Server + Zune combo is one to try.

The app allows you to control Windows Media Center from the phone, but it’s not just about navigating menus, oh no. You can view your library of Recorded TV & Movies with full synopses, cast and crew, poster artwork and ratings. You can also browse through your music library by album, artist and again rate the tracks you love the most.

If you’ve got a decent media library tucked away on your PC or home server, then you should definitely check this app out. You can see the latest video of it running on the Windows Phone 7 SDK Emulator over at YouTube.        

For example, did you know you can set up event reminders, use parental controls, connect Windows Media Center to Windows Home Server, read RSS feeds in Media Center, or tweet from Media Center?  Those are just a few of the features covered in this detailed guide. You can read the rest of it here.

Going through the finances line by line was revealing – one of our major outgoings was our TV satellite service. I love sport and movies, so we had the full package from our provider, but when we talked about it, we were no longer watching as much TV as we used to – and the programmes we both loved were available free to air. So we took the decision to cut the cord, and swap our satellite service for Freeview (the UK’s free to air digital TV service).

Of course, that meant losing our DVR, so picked up a relatively cheap ASRock Nettop (the Intel Atom/NVIDIA ION powered ION 330) which could handle 1080p high definition video and came with HDMI out, so it was a cinch to hook up to the TV. All of our Live and Recorded TV (as well as music, video and photo streaming) goes through Windows Media Center, which is a truly fantastic entertainment platform.

These new breed of nettops offer all the power you need for HDTV, and their tiny footprint means that you can slot them easily into your TV cabinet. But that small form factor isn’t great for slotting in PCI TV Tuner cards, and the ION 330 doesn’t ship with an integrated tuner. So, I could have tried a USB tuner, which is a convenient option, but instead I went for a network tuner.

A network tuner is a small, standalone box that you connect to your TV source, but also has an Ethernet connection that plugs into your router. The premise is simple – rather than be limited to wherever your antenna is located, with a network tuner, your TV signal is now available wherever you have a network connection. That means you can now view Live TV on any PC or compatible device on the network.

If you’re lucky enough to have your house fully wired with Ethernet sockets, you’re set. Use a Powerline network adaptor and again, you’ll have a TV signal waiting for you wherever you have a power socket. The latest network tuners are now offering 802.11n Wi-Fi connections and Live TV streaming to remote devices, so there’s definitely no excuse to miss your favourite programmes – wherever you are.

There’s an increasing number of network tuners hitting the market, that work with a wide variety of TV standards. Check outSilicon Dust’s HDHomeRun, which kicked off the category a couple of years ago, AverMedia’s HD HomeFree Duet and PCTV’s newly announced Broadway which will be on the market soon.

One year later, not only are we saving our monthly TV subscriptions, but the combination of Windows Media Center, a mini-HTPC and dual Network Tuners has improved our TV viewing and lets us watch what we want, wherever we want. 

Media Browser will also pull the latest movie trailers and video podcasts from the Internet, comes with a number of high quality themes for changing the colour scheme and layout of content and best of all, is completely free!

Head over to mediabrowser.tv to learn more about the latest release of the app, which has been released this week. It convinced me to cut the cable and go with Media Center full time in the living room as our DVR, and we haven’t looked back since. 

The Acer Revo Multimedia PC is one of a new breed of small, silent and powerful HTPCs designed for the Living Room. You may think that the future of Connected TV is slotting an Ethernet cable directly in the back of your screen, or via a set-top box with a groovy name, but a small footprint PC offers more power, more flexibility and fantastic entertainment experiences with platforms like Windows Media Center, XBMC and Boxee.

The Revo RL-100 looks like any other consumer electronics device in your TV cabinet, with DVD and Blu-ray options so you can replace those devices for a start. It’s powered by an AMD Athlon Neo II dual-core processor combined with NVIDIA’s ION GPU for 1080P high definition streaming. Connect it up to your TV or receiver courtesy of the HDMI and optical out ports and enjoy the hybrid TV tuner, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB Hard drive, 802.11n wireless and Gigabit LAN all integrated in the box. Plug in, switch on and enjoy Live and Recorded TV, online video plus music, video and photos streamed across your local network. 

But wait, there’s more! See that copper button under the Blu-ray drive? Hit it and out pops an illuminated multi-touch controller, which serves as remote control, wireless touchpad and keyboard. No one’s typing their next novel on this, but it’s ideal for web searching, tweeting, and the instant messaging. I know what you’re thinking – it’s going to chew batteries, isn’t it? Nope, it recharges when plugged back into the mother ship.

Expect to see the RL-100 is part of a suite of digital home products unveiled by Acer this month as they seek to invade living rooms all over the world. With this kind of kit, my door’s already open.

Vista users can continue to use the older version of the plugin, though. The developer says that two-thirds of the plugin’s users are on Windows 7, so he made the decision to make improvements the majority can enjoy.

So what’s new in this release?  Things users have been asking for, including:

• A new popup screen for managing the TV programs, allowing you to play the program, set a timer recording to record other showings of the program if you have a TV tuner configured, and if the program supports it you can add it to a playlist or download it (the last two work for BBC WMV programs, but not flash).
• When playing flash content, sometimes the mouse didn't click in the right place. Now you can mode the cursor round the screen with the remote by pressing the cursor keys, and OK to click. This allows you to play even the most troublesome programs.
• The interface is now touchscreen enabled, so if you have a touchscreen media center you can easily navigate through the screens.
• Plugins are now directly available within the application. When you go to preferences you will see a list of plugins. When you pick one, the system will take care of installing and updating it to keep you up to date with your favorite content.
• MSN has been removed. This is because there is now a native media center app to support MSN.
• Improved memory management - only one instance of TunerFreeMCE will be active at any one time

If you’ve never tried TunerFreeMCE before, I recommend checking it out. It’s a great plugin for watching streaming Internet video on your PC and Media Center extender, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five for UK users and Hulu support for US users. Believe it or not, the plugin is actually free. However, donations are accepted.

(via Ian Dixon)

Now that same HD streaming is available in Media Center too. Ian Dixon reports that Netflix members running Windows 7 will have access to over 1800 movies in HD in Windows Media Center. In addition to streaming, from within the WMC Netflix app, you can also search your Netflix library, manage your Instant and DVD queues, filter searches and more.

You can browse videos by subject or category or you can use the included search feature to search for videos by keyword. Search works via remote, too. After your results display on the screen, you can further drill down by date, ratings, views and relevance.

The project is still in beta, but is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Plus, if you head over to the GreenButton forums where it was discovered, you’ll see developers are pitching in with suggestions and additional features. For example, on this post, there are SkyDrive-hosted files for adding Onion News and News of the Absurd podcasts to the app.

You can grab the beta download itself from here.

First up is a revamp of Veronica’s Radio, a demo application that was to debut at Mix 06 to show off the Media Center Markup Language. It was eventually cut from the talk, but was made available briefly to those who wanted to install it via a command line interface. Only a few folks ever did, though, due to its not so user-friendly nature. But now, thanks to an email from a WMC fan, Owen modified the markup, updated the radio stations and created an installer for the streaming music app. You can now grab it from here.

He also updated the simple “Time + Date” WMC Extra applet, which does exactly what it sounds like it does: it shows the date and time. The new version now works on Windows 7 and is available here.

Finally, he put together a package of goodies for WMC developers he dubbed the “Windows Media Center SDK for Windows 7 Addendum.” The unofficial collection includes the following tools:

• A couple of new and updated loose MCML samples (mostly to fix up the URLs to the defunct play.mediacentersandbox.com).
• Source code for the Sample Explorer application you find in the Extras Library after installing the SDK as well as the desktop browsing tool. This is a good example of one approach for creating a testing / automation framework for your own application.
• Source code for Animation Explorer and Preview Tool Launcher desktop tools. The Preview Tool actually has a pretty robust automation model itself and this source shows you how to take full advantage for your own authoring tools.
• Source code for the Visual Studio 2008 templates included with the SDK. Perhaps someone in the community will update these and redistribute for Visual Studio 2010.
• Web Application Installer Template used to create the installers for the above applets. They are fully compatible with the InstallApplication Method in Windows 7 and can be used to craft installers for http://madeformediacenter.com/m4mc/.

Those are available as a zip file from here.

To get started, you’ll first need to create an account at MadeForMediaCenter.com, then download either the 32-bit or 64-bit version of the addin. Once installed, the addin will prompt you for your credentials upon first launch. After entering in your info (username and password), you can browse the available third-party media center apps and install them immediately.

This addin is still in beta format, so report your issues in the Made for Media Center forum or to the @4mediacenter Twitter account.

Also, may I just say this to the developers: thank you for this awesome project!

(via The Digital Lifestyle)

Recently posted to LifeHacker, this tip is worth sharing:

1. Open the registry. Scroll down toComputer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\HidIr\Remotes\745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da
2. Find the REG_DWORD named CodeSetNum0 and change the value to Zero.
3. Reboot the PC and enjoy.

By default, Windows listens to channel 1 and the Zune remote is channel 8. This hack works by setting the ID to 0 which allows Windows to listen to all the IR ID’s. It’s been tested in Windows 7 and not in other versions, but there’s no reason to believe that it wouldn’t work in those, too. Let us know if you try it!

Once installed, Songler gives you access to the 6 million tracks hosted on Spotify’s streaming music service. The tracks are searchable by artist, album, or song name. Now with the new Last.fm integration, you can scrobble the tunes you listen to using Spotify back to your Last.fm account, too. You can also stream Last.fm stations directly in Media Center.

Songler is available as a free download from the (unofficial) Windows Media Center app store at madeformediacenter.com.

In the updated version of the plugin, there’s now support for widescreen viewing, an optional day/night (sun/moon) forecast indication next to the location title, as well as some other tweaks and improvements to the visual style.

Windows 7 users can download the new plugin from here for 32-bit systems or here for 64-bit systems.

(via/img credit: GeekTonic.com)

In addition, there’s now content available from the Zune Video podcast library, too, which includes videos from ABC News, CBS News, CNBC, CNET TV, Comedy Central, Current TV, The Discovery Channel, Fox, G4 TV, HBO, MSNBC, NBC, Showtime, Revision 3, and some user-generated videos too. Some of the Zune video content is even in HD.

Finally, both clips and full length shows have been added from MSN and MSNBC.com. This includes TV shows like Arrested Development, news and weather from MSNBC, editor picks and most popular videos, five day weather forecasts, news, video playlists, music videos, movie trailers and more.

If you haven’t gotten the update yet, you can force it to download by going to Tasks -> Settings -> General -> Automatic Download Options.

In order to install Mobile Media Center, you’ll need to run the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 or higher and a Windows Mobile 5 or 6 device.

To download the application, visit the Mobile Media Center page here. (Note: scroll down when the page loads, there is some odd white space at the top).

Unfortunately, the one problem with the program is that it doesn’t offer a GUI front-end where you can add new entries. Instead, you have to manually configure XML and INI files if you want to add any extra program besides PowerDVD, which is included by default.

That’s why you’ll also want to grab the Media Center Launcher Configurator app from here (more info can be found on Chad Dyess’ blog). This additional application provides a simple interface to the Launcher program, allowing you to track, register, and unregister the applications.

I guess for some of you enthusiasts this will be old news based on the date of Chad’s blog entry, but I only recently came across it when searching for something similar and thought it was worth sharing with you.

The folks over at Missing Remote have put together a guide on how to add Hulu Desktop to Media Center as a shortcut from the main screen. This isn’t the only way to get this done, but at least it’s well-documented! Thanks guys.

STEPS (via Missing Remote):

Note, the following steps assume you installed into the default Hulu directory, which is C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Local\HuluDesktop. If you changed the directory, simply replace the directories in the ini and xml files.

1. Download the file here: HuluMCE Plugin
2. Unzip the folder into your Hulu directory (which default is C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\HuluDesktop\)
3. The files should result in a HuluMCE folder (C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\HuluDesktop\HuluMCE).
4. IMPORTANT STEP: Browse to the above HuluMCE folder, and Right Click on the HuluMCEreg.xml file and select EDIT
   1. Replace the username "Mike" from the following line with YOUR USERNAME:  imageUrl="C:\Users\Mike\AppData\Local\HuluDesktop\HuluMCE\icon.png"
5. Still in the above folder, right click on the InstallHulu.cmd and select Run as Administrator
6. A dialog box will appear with the message Success
7. Close all your windows, launch Media Center with your remote, and the shortcut for Hulu Desktop will appear under the TV+Movies row, as well as in the Program Library

*NOTE: If you prefer to have the shortcut appear in the TV+Movies row, you will need to edit theHuluMCEreg.xml file (Right click > Edit). On the line which says  <category category="Services\TV"/>, replace TV with Pictures. (eg., <category category="Services\Pictures"/> You can visit the followingMSDN Webpage for a full list of category entrypoints you can launch from.

For more details, check out their blog post.

Now, theming your Media Center isn’t an official feature of the software, but it’s a relatively easy hack for those of you who like to tinker and personalize your PC in unconventional ways. (We have some more info on this here. There’s also step-by-step instructions for changing the default blue theme to black here).

There are already some pretty great themes available over on the new site, including this new theme called "Bokeh" which features colorful bubbles and black guides and menus.

Once you have your new theme installed, head back over to hack7mc.com and check out how you can customize your Media Center icons to match.