Today I did some reorganizing and had a chain of really long USB cables to use, so I plugged one end into the back of the Xbox 360 and then wrapped the cable along the baseboards, ending nestled into couch.  Woop!  Now I have a USB port for the Xbox 360 right there.  My inner dork rejoices!

By the way, the Xbox 360 has USB keyboard support.  It’s really handy for typing out messages and such.  Media Center Extender doesn’t work all that great with the keyboard, unfortunately, since the arrow keys inexplicably don’t work in it.

Not only is the color randomized, but the texture is as well.  This feature is more like the frosting on a cake, but even though it’s not a core feature it definitely contributes to a more pleasing user experience.

Keeping in mind that this version of Media Center is currently in beta, I have noticed an inconsistency in the interface.  While the generic title for albums has this very colorful scheme, picture tiles still have the old, white-on-blue theme.

Still, it’s nice how the pictures now fade into view when they are loaded.  I am very interested to see how the final version of Windows 7 Media Center turns out.

Now there is a “movies” menu front and center in Media Center’s start menu.

Selecting the “Movie Library” item shows the following screen.  I started taking screenshots of the process of adding the DVD’s into the library, but the process was so “duh” obvious that I decided to leave the process out.

After I told Media Center where the DVDs were it found all of them and put them in the menu for me to play.

Selecting a DVD brings up a menu about the DVD.  (This menu is the same template as for selecting an album in a list of music or a video in a list of videos.)  There seems to be a lot of room for metadata.  I don’t know how that is supposed to work, but hopefully there’s more to come.

Pressing right bring up a list of actions, which for DVDs apparently only lets me edit the disk title.

When I select “restart” my experience is just as though I put in a DVD, except more responsive.  I have found that skipping around in the video is much more responsive in this version of Media Center, as compared with Vista’s.

After holding right for a seconds, the selector switches from jumping from one item to the next slowly to this new scrolling mode in Media Center.  I forget it’s specific name, but what it does is great.  All of the items in the background fade out a little and wizz by, while only a few items show up slowly on top.  This allows the user to jump to the general area of an item in a big list.  When the user lets go of the left or right button, the item shown in the forground is left selected, and the items in the background fade back in.  The whole process is very well animated and seems useful as well.

However, this still is a beta after all, so currently in the Windows 7 beta if the DVD that it selects to show in the foreground begins with “The”, media center will select those letters as the current position.  It’s nice that Media Center ignores words like “the” in it’s alphabetizing algorithm, but the guys who wrote the quick scrolling feature didn’t seem to get the memo.  I’m sure this will be fixed by the time the Release Candidate is released.

Another nifty new feature of Media Center in Windows 7 is that the user can now, finally, change the position of the video by clicking and dragging the position indicator.  It’s acceptable that this wasn’t possible in the past; Media Center is primarily intended to be used on a couch with a remote control, but it’s nice that Media Center is getting this feature as well.  (Side note: Media Center is also receiving many touch-related features, but more on that later.)

I wonder if this thing supports ripped BluRay disks…  I’ll have to investigate.

Here’s a quick jump forward to the final product:

 Amazon has a great set of web services available from aws.amazon.com, and one of the services enables integration with Amazon’s online store.  Best of all, the sample code was written in C#, which is my programming language of choice.  The API itself is very easy to use and quite powerful, but enough of that.

My program, which I quickly decided to call DVD Cover Art Finder (very creative), uses the Amazon Associates Web Service to suggest 6 possible cover arts.  When the user selects one of the choices, the selection is shown in the bigger image box, and the dvd title is updated to the title as listed on Amazon.  I added in a bunch of quick keyboard shortcuts to make the process go a lot faster, which I really needed since I used the software to get 200+ cover arts.  The program also renames the DVD’s folder to the DVD title, and preserves the DVD disk label and some other information in a data file that it keeps in the DVD’s folder.

As you can clearly see, I haven’t put much effort into polishing the product yet (note the window’s title of Form1).  Using it to get a bunch of cover art, however, the thing is stable.

I’ll be finalizing this at some point and publish it to my blog, including the source code.  For now just marvel. 

FYI, Media Center also supports three ways to display the DVDs.  The one previously shown is “View Large”.  This one below is “View Small”, and there is a third option that I don’t find very useful called “View List”.

Selecting a DVD shows the disk’s location and and bigger cover art.

Playing the DVD is exactly the same experience as playing a physical DVD, except there’s no disk.

The setup process was so easy, that this post is more a demo than a tutorial.  "The next step" is always obvious.

The first thing I did was install the card in my computer.  That was just like installing any other PCI card.  Then, of course, I hooked the card up to a standard co-axial cable so that it could have a signal to work with.

Next, I turned on my computer and saw this:

Then I clicked on it just to see what was going on.

Then Windows asked me to restart.  Even though I doubt I really needed to, I did anyway.

Next I opened Windows Media Center.

Then I scrolled over to "set up tv".

I’m going to describe the proceeding steps, but honestly the next step is always apparent.

I clicked next.

I selected yes.

I selected next.

I waited for a few seconds.

I selected automatically.

I selected next.

I waited for a few seconds.

I selected yes.

I selected next.

I selected next.

I selected yes.

I selected next.

I selected I agree.

I selected next.

I entered my ZIP code.

I selected next. (note: I edited my ZIP code out.)
 

I waited for a few seconds.

I chose the right provider. (Note: I edited the first part of the names out.)
 

I selected next.
 

I waited for a few seconds.

I clicked next.

I scrolled over to "live tv".

I selected "live tv".

I channel surfed!

I’d say the whole process took under 30 minutes, though I can’t be sure because I didn’t do it all at the same time.  Features I can now use include pausing live TV, rewinding live TV, easily skipping past commercials, using the guide, schedule recording single episodes or whole seasons,  watching TV recordings that are currently recording, burning recordings to DVD, copying the recording files directly to my laptop, and syncing recordings with my Zune.  Best of all, like always I can bring this whole experience down to my TV through my Xbox.  All of that is on top of the Media Center functionality that I could already use!

w00t!

One option is D-Links amazing but equally expensive new router, plus a media bridge for the Xbox, plus an adapter for my desktop.  The bottom line?  More than $500.  Ouch.  I need something a little less expensive.

The best choice for performance has been and always will be a wired connection.  The problem is that I can’t just run wires along the base of the walls on the floors.  As I was thinking about how to easily get ethernet cables into the wall, I had an idea:

There are outlets like this all over the house.  This one goes from my room, up to the attic.  There’s another one that goes from my attic down to the family room, where the router is, and there’s another one that goes from there to the basement!  For a quick and messy solution, all I would have to do is drop a cable down from the upper receptacles and catch it through the lower ones below.  When I want to do a more polished job I can just cut a somewhat square-ish hole in the wall, like the cable guy did, and drill an Ethernet faceplate directly into the drywall.

I’m going to have to try that.