New extenders this year - honest!

Good news? Who knows. The old (current) extenders suck. Specifically, because they will not play any videos or audio that require a codec. Now seriously, if you are technically savvy enough to want a Media Center in the first place, chances are you are technically savvy to have some videos around encoded in Divx or Xvid that you'd like to have access to on it. Easy enough on the main system (just install a codec pack), but the ability is completely left out of the current batch of extenders.

True wait and see on this one.

Ed Bott’s Media Central » New extenders this year - honest!: "Jason Tsang goes to the MVP Summit and teases us with this tidbit:
V2 Extenders should be out sometime this year (2007). … Unfortunately, the exact dates/timeframes are under NDA …"

Ian Dixon: Ask Charlie Owen your Media Center Questions

Ian Dixon: Ask Charlie Owen your Media Center Questions: "If you want to ask Charlie a question about Windows Media Center now is your chance. So head to his blog and leave a question on THIS blog post."

Turning on Closed Captioning in Media Center

Not deaf? Sometimes it is still nice to have silence and some closed captioning on your tv, but how do you turn it on in MCE? It isn't exactly obvious so I thought I'd share how to do it.

With the TV full screen, hit the "More Info" button on your MCE remote (you can also right click on the TV screen with the mouse). Choose "Settings." Next, select "TV" and there it is, "Captions."

From here you can choose between two different styles (all along the bottom, or in the bottom left corner) and gives a few options that are pretty cool - such as to turn them on when you mute the program (and off when you unmute).

Play MAME Arcade games on your media center

The Digital Lifestyle Developer Blog : Just to prove I'm not COMPLETELY full of it...: "Just to prove that I'm not completely making all of this up, I've got an alpha version of a program you may want to try. For those people who love classic arcade action (and have managed to troll eBay to find yourself an arcade machine board or two), I've created MAMECenter, an interface to let you play Multi Arcade Machine Emulator games from your Media Center."

Ian Dixon: Orb's Web based Windows Media Center Extender

This looks cool...

Ian Dixon: Orb's Web based Windows Media Center Extender: "Somehow I totally missed a great feature of Orb. We all want a PC based Windows Media Center Extender (Microsoft had a rumored project called Softled that has never seen the light of day). The aim of this program would be to extend the Windows Media Center UI to other Media Center PC's around the home. So that you could watch live or recorded TV on any of your Media Center PCs no mater on which one the content was based on. "