• Ogg Vorbis
• MJPG in DirectX
• WTVC
• AC3 Filter
• AC-3 Filter
• Panasonic D-Snap codec
• Song Signature Plugin Powertoy
• MaxxPlayer
• Volume Logic
• BoA Kwon

and while we're at it,

Top 10 Most Popular Plug-ins

• DFX - Audio Enhancement
• Nero Fast CD-Burning Plug-in
• MP3 Remix
• G-Force
• XVid Codec
• Divx 5.0
• Windows Media Bonus Pack for Windows XP
• Divx Codec
• Divx 3.0
• ACELP.net

You'll notice the Batman Begins viz isn't available yet.  I've been pinging the team and they found a few bugs in testing. I'd expect it to be up this week. 

RSS Feed: WMPlugins.com Latest Additions

Deerfield, Ill high schooler builds tri-level treehouse complete with home automation and what else but Media Center :)

You can see MCE05 approximately 1:30 into the clip from the Chicago ABC affiliate. Nice.

Steve Lacey puts out an idea for creating a standard format for Podcast show notes.  I think this is a fine idea. Besides offering a simpler way to archive show notes and cross-reference based on contextual tagging, I can see real-world applications for this in the Media Player space.  Show notes are small- imagine if the notes were "stuffed" into the header of an MP3 or WMA file. Media Players and Portable Music Players could read this data and present while you're listening to the broadcast.  Add support for a simple mark-in and mark-out tags, and you have a searchable index of audio segments so you can jump directly to that segment you wanted to hear earlier.  Imagine if on your portable media player you could jump directly back to the last "chapter" of a podcast, just like a DVD you turned off last night?  It's not full bookmarking, but its a rough approximate and good enough for most.

Of course, there are still some problems with this idea such as if you're licensing ASCAP music for example. According to the ASCAP non-interactive license 5.0, "Examples of non-interactive music uses that qualify for Release 5.0 include...Radio broadcasts or pod-casts that do not offer a play-list, program guide, and do not make advance lists of the songs contained in the programs available prior to their transmission."

I'm not a lawyer but the net-net I'm hearing is that you'd need to omit the show notes in order to be eligible under ASCAP's license.  If you have more details on this, feel free to share.  Otherwise it sounds like you'd need pay to play but there are still a number of reasons to do this.

So is support for Show notes support the next thing for Audio Tag Editors?  I don't know. But I think it's something worth discussing. 

RSS: Steve Lacey

(BTW:  I HATE summer colds :( )

Musical mashups or "mash-ups" are a relatively new thing in the space of music remixing.  Mashups are based on the simple idea that many songs out today use primary chord progressions and lyrical stanzas. Last year's, "The Grey Album" offered up a mash-up of Jay-Z's, "The Black Album", with the Beatles', "White Album".  The result? Entertainment Weekly's album of the year and a lawsuit.  Then came, "The Beastles", a mash-up of The Beatles and the Beastie Boys showed this was a burgeoning new space with some definite talent.

Over the past few months, Adam Curry has played one mashup in particular that I think leaves all others in the dust.  A combination called, "Boulevard of Broken Songs" mashes Green Day vs. Oasis vs. Aerosmith/Eminem in such a way that shows there really are only 3 chord progressions in rock. Good thing I like those chords. I love listening to it driving with the top down on the ride to/from work.

You may have heard it on the radio, you can find links to it out on the net - just read the SFGate article on the topic and you can learn where to download it, and the back-history. Sorry no links today for obvious reasons :)

This is too cool for words. MSN has an incubation team working on a next-generation Web portal/online RSS client called, "Start".
http://www.start.com/myw3b/.  Click on the Start logo in the upper-right, add a feed- just type the URL for the webpage and the service auto-detects and validates an RSS feed (if available).  This is brilliant.

While you're at it, go play in the MSN Sandbox. Lots of cool stuff happening in incubation these days.

My friend Chris Pirillo (who often takes a baseball bat I call, "Sense" to MS product groups) was just featured in the Seattle Times.
Chris is definitely not your average user, but I have to hand it to him- he was extolling the virtues of RSS over two years ago and was toying with Podcasting long before others got it. Chris- congratulations and I'll see you at Gnomedex and I'm giving my mom your 1-888 line for support ;).  Anyone else want to do a meet-up, drop me a line.

RSS: Chris Pirillo's Blog
RSS: The Chris Pirillo Show
RSS: The Seattle Times

Major Nelson, the (un)official spokesblogger for Xbox Live is doing an Xbox 360 Faceplate Design Competition. Winner gets a special edition E3 faceplate. They already have over 350 entries in less than 2 days and are using Flickr to host em. Check it out, a lot of very cool designs up there. You can view a slide show of the entries here (hint: use your keyboard arrow keys to navigate) or subscribe to this RSS feed and get them in your feed reader.  Oh and if you have the chops, enter to win up to $125,000 designing a PC too.

RSS: Major Nelson.com
RSS: Xbox 360 Faceplate Entries on Flickr

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet Furrygoat (a.k.a. Steve Makofsky) in person.  We've chatted over the years but never had an opportunity to meet. Steve points us to Lou Amadio's new blog, "Ooey GUI" which besides being a cool name for a blog, offers up some great GUI tips and tricks for developers.  From Furrygoat:

Do any Windows programming?

I'm happy to say that after several weeks of peer pressure between Shawn and I, Lou finally buckled and started a blog. Head on over to Ooey GUI, a new blog by Lou Amadio.

So far he's posted some great tips of Fast Solid Fills and DIB sections. Lou's the man when it comes to GDI, GDI+ and layered windows (yes! It's the Lou, who wrote the only MSDN article on Layered Windows).

Welcome Lou!

RSS: The Furrygoat Experience
RSS: OoeyGUI (technically RDF but who's counting) ;)

Our friends at Niveus dropped me a line yesterday to note that the Niveus Denali Media Center PCs are now available at Magnolia and Tweeter home AV stores. In my estimation, the Denali is the "Escalade of Media Center PCs," and was recently named by Computer Shopper as, "...the Ultimate Media Center PC". The Denali has the attributes of high-end A/V gear, including an A/V-style form-factor, silent operation enabled by the passive cooling technology, and a complete A/V rear panel of high-quality connections, including gold-plated RCA and BNC connectors for Component Video. Additionally, the “Denali Edition” is built with only the highest quality audio and video components, including television tuners, and video processing certified by the Image Science Foundation (ISF).

So if you want to see one in person, drop by a store.  If you live in the Seattle area, drop by Magnolia in Bellevue and ask for Dennis- a 10+ year veteran of the AV retail biz, he's helped me and a few friends out from time to time.  Perhaps we'll get a geek dinner together.

Also be sure to see their Terabyte server- a best of CES 2005 Innovations award winner. It stores days of photos, music, video and more,  this integrated solution requires only power and a wired ethernet connection. Somehow I think Thomas Hawk will end up getting one of these.  Now we just need an RSS feed for their latest and greatest announcements ;).

More from around the world of Media Center development:

- mceSAPI - add Speech and Voice Recognition to your MCE apps (HowTo)

- DirectX Shell for Media Center (under development) - Developers are looking for a way to develop rich, animated UI for applications in Media Center.

- MCE Controller (v1.1, source available on SourceForge) - control MCE via TCP/IP commands over home network (all-purpose, designed for home automation)

Know of any other projects- shared or otherwise?  Drop a comment here.

Looking for tabbed browsing in IE?  Faster desktop search?  Check out the new MSN Toolbar with Desktop Search and Tabbed browsing released this week.  I've been running it through its paces and have to say, after using Copernic Desktop Search for a while, I really like it.  It even has a feature to pause indexing if you're running on battery power- I've hated this on laptops and it shows they're thinking through the end to end scenarios.

S lightning fast and if you have Mac Spotlight envy, you'll be sated in the meantime until Longhorn arrives.  MSN Desktop search gets the job done. The implementation is sound and faster than other solutions I've seen.

My favorite feature thought is support for a broad range of add-ins for searching everything from .zipfiles to .chm (compressed HTML help files).  You can get more at http://addins.msn.com.

In other MSN news, they've announced plans for a subscription service. Gee, I don't know how anyone saw that coming... ;)  MSN Music also has a buy 1 get 5 free deal on right now- no subscription required (heh, sorry I couldn't help myself).