Windows Media Center

Windows 7 Beta is out today. It’s free to participate in, so if you’re interested, please check it out and give us feedback. To whet the appetites of my compressionist friends, one much-requested new feature in the Format SDK .dll in Windows 7: It now can go up to 8-way threading, compared to the…

Once I’ve answered the same question in three different emails, I figure it’s time to blog it. By that metric, I should have blogged this about 17 times over by now! Is VC-1 the same as Windows Media Video 9?Yes, the big picture: VC-1 is the SMPTE standardized version (SMPTE 421M) of Windows Media…

Great news – the full Moonlight 1.0 has been released. I talked about the beta back in the fall. We used the beta for the Presidential Inauguration, (further details in this Channel 9 interview). Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight, built from the public specifications, based…

Sometimes I blog to make it easy for me to find a URL later. This is one of those times. We’ve published a new whitepaper at Streamingmedia.com, the “Silverlight Migration Guide: Upgrading Your Windows Media Player Online Experiences.” It’s written by long-time Windows Media and Silverlight…

Up until recently if you wanted to have a Media Center that recorded your cable pay channels, you had to buy an certified Windows Media Center.  That changed last year when Microsoft opened up the platform allowing any of us to build Media Centers that rely on CableCard. The last…

When computers fail, they really fail. They fail hard. Many hours of weekend time is taken up rebuilding, reformatting and redata-ing (?) the broken computer. Time is valuable! Now I've had a personal experience of the sanity saving Windows Home Server automated backup. In the most recent week, I…

Like many countries, the UK is in the midst of a “digital switchover”. Our analogue TV signal is being switched off, region by region, to be replaced by a digital signal which needs a new or re-tuned set top box to decode. The nation’s aerial engineers are out in force, and of course, the big box…