If you’re the DIY type who likes to build their own HTPC and home media server, you might be interested in what James has created. Basically, he’s combined Windows Vista Media Center and Windows Home Server systems inside one PC enclosure powered by two separate Micro-ATX motherboards. In his setup, James also stashed in an Ethernet hub, two power supplies, and a handful of hard drives to boot Vista and backup his media. All in all, a pretty wild setup as you will see in the attached video. [via] MORE »

Ever wish you could show off all your digital camera’s video clips as easily as you do your photos on VMC? Well, guess what? chandler72 has released a free Beta app called clipShow on Microsoft’s CodePlex that does just that. What’s more, users can create playlists, play clips by date / tags, or set clipShow to rotate through random clips at timed playback intervals (30 / 60 / 90 seconds) or their entirety. [via]

UPDATE: I see that Stuart at The Media Center Blog has posted nice walk-through and review of clipShow. Give it a look — lots of screenshots provided.

I just got pinged by Pearing-CORE Systems notifying me that their innovative MEdiaCOre Enclosure is now available to the mass consumer public online. What’s interesting is that the company has decided to get into the high-end Media Center PC business as well with their offering. So not only can you pick up the MEdiaCOre Enclosure ($3,200) with its custom PC chassis to bring-your-own PC components, you can also opt for a pre-configured DLS ($6,100 starting) or DLS+ ($7,100 starting) system running Vista Media Center. The note also mentions that Pearing-CORE Systems will be showing at the Electronics Home Expo this November and at CES next year. If you’re new to the product, you might want to catch up here and here.

UPDATE: I just found out that the MEdiaCOre Enclosure not only includes the chassis to mount your PC hardware, it also comes with control panel switches, a cooling fan, internal power strip, and few extra assembly goodies.

One of the major selling features of the Inteset media server has been its ability to store, search, and play back movies seamlessly within the Windows Media Center interface using the proprietary Movie Collection module. Inteset has offered this feature to its dealers for years and has now improved the capabilities by adding full Blu-ray support. In addition, movie profile lookups are simpler than ever. The system will scan the inserted DVD or Blu-ray disc to identify it, and then retrieve full profile information from Inteset’s all-new movie database. Lookups can also be performed based on UPC code and movie title. MORE »

Originally I was going to report on a yet another Vista Media Center (VMC) hack that enables users to launch their pre-installed DVD/Blu-ray player application from within Media Center, but it got me thinking. Why can’t Cyberlink (the creator of PowerDVD) create an add-in or Microsoft introduce a local disc playback feature into VMC when a supported player/decoder app is detected? Here’s what I’m talking about… we know that you need to install an application like PowerDVD in order to playback DVD and Blu-ray movies on your PC, so why not use PowerDVD as the backend engine and have a standard control and playback VMC interface for viewing movie discs? It has always seemed silly to me that you have to launch an external application to do such a media-centric task (MythTV, SageTV, Beyond TV have been able to do something similar to this for years).

It was just back in April when a software developer on The Green Button forum suggested that the community should get together and produce an open-source clone of Niveus’ Movie Library – an add-on application first demo’d at EHX in March that exclusively provided Niveus PC users a way to manage their DVDs, stored video, and recorded TV content via Windows Vista Media Center. Unfortunately, for Niveus (who I’m sure were showcasing their application as a product differentiator) the Open Media Library project (hosted at Google Code and licensed under GPL v3) picked up a following of enthusiastic supporters and to date has a total of 4 project owners and 7 project members leading the development. [Beta Announcement] MORE »

In a nutshell, TV Manager takes recordings made in Vista Media Center or MCE 2005, copies them to WHS for storage, deletes the original files from the PC, and allows PC users to playback the recordings from WHS on any video player that supports DVR-MS. Additionally, TV Manager enables users to watch their recordings in Media Center as if they were still located in the PC’s library via “Recorded TV” (neat trick). Note: TV Manager is currently in Beta and is under heavy development. You might want to check back on the developer’s blog for new updates and bug fixes like this one.