Just when you thought the sub-$700 Media Center PCs had arrived, eMachines delivers with a sub-$600 Media Center PC.  It has an Athlon 64 3400+, 200GB HDD, 1GB RAM, dual-layer DVD burner, and retails for $599 after the rebate. No mention of the TV tuner card. The video card is a bit underpowered for hard-core gamers as an ATI Radeon Xpress 200, but hey, this thing generally beats my Gateway FMC-901X.  Available at Circuit City and Best Buy retailers (couldn't find online).

[RSS - Via BetaNews]

Dave Winer gives a sneak preview of what's to come tomorrow at Gnomedex. That's right- a demo of THE browser:

On Friday you'll see how deeply integrated RSS is in the architecture of the browser. But that's just the tip of what may turn out to be a very big iceberg. The people at Microsoft noticed something that I had seen, only peripherally -- that there were applications of RSS that aren't about news.

Anyway, there's a lot more to what they're doing, but I wanted to say in advance that I think what they're doing is cool. They apparently were concerned about what I would think. I want them to relax and give a really great demo on Friday, and know that the OPML Editor will support the very simple extensions to RSS that they are developing, and I look forward to collaborating on further extensions and perhaps even new formats as we go forward.

I am pleased that Microsoft is working with the community, this is a new model for them, and it's hard for big companies to turn this kind of corner. I see that they're really trying, and I appreciate that, and welcome them.

That's mighty praise coming from Dave Winer. And if you have no idea what all this RSS stuff is about, don't worry- the net-net is making information easier for you to consume.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication Blog
RSS: Dave Winer's Blog

Have you ever gone temporarily mad trying to book a multi-stop business trip only to hit the back button and lose everything?  CoolHunting points us to AirTreks new TripPlanner, a Flash-based trip planning and pricing service that took 1/4 the time to pull up a 4-stop trip than a 1 stop at ahem... the other folks' site.  I cannot vouch for pricing but I'd pay $5 per trip just for the convenience of actually being able to work through what-if scenarios quickly.

<rant>While I'm at it, I want a flight pricing service that builds a calendar grid showing prices for the same flights on different days. Then you just pick and choose.  Most of us by now know that Tuesday is normally the cheapest day of the week to fly, but if I'm flexible in my vacation planning. How about just giving me the info instead of making me cobble together a little spreadsheet of "what if" scenarios?  What's that you say, most people just suck it up and pay the higher prices to fly the days they want to?  Damn. Does anyone else spend 2 hours trying to find the best deals?</rant>

Some groups just get that developers are the key. Flickr had a good service, but not much to stand out.  So what did they do?  They learned from Amazon, from EBay and Google. They built a rich yet simple API set, added feeds, made it public and easy to build to, and evangelized to the geek community.  The result?  Some really amazing apps.  Check out this one: type in any series of words and Spell with Flickr will grab live images of text from Flickr pools to create a montage. Oh and it's done in script. Nice.

Now, I don't think this is a true "Portable Media Center" (hey, no Green Button folks!) but Stuff magazine is reporting on a new portable media player from the once, twice, many times sold company formerly known as Commodore.  No additional details however I can say that I got a call from some folks at Commodore's parent company a while back and put them in touch with some other folks internally.  Now I see the device was WMV support.  I hope by playing "connector" I helped in making that happen.  Time to hit them up for my eval device I think :)

From Stuff onine:

A capacious, nay, rapacious 30GB hard drive gobbles down MP4, DivX 5.0 and WMV9 files, while also despatching MP3, AAC, WMA and little known G726 audio files with aplomb, whatever a plomb is.

Read more here.

My bad: I neglected to post that the RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP is now available for free download and it works with Media Center! Things have been a bit busy- more details on that shortly.  Oh and Longhorn will still have native RAW uncompressed photo format support ;).

Via eHomeUpgrade: If you've been looking for slick and inexpensive way to control your MCE PC from any room in the house, checkout ACS' new, $99 Graphical Media Center Remote Front Panel (via F-Stop Blues). The manufacture claims: "Not only does it display the current MCE state [on a 128 x 64 LCD], it also allows you to control MCE using the membrane switch overlay – change radio stations, browse photos, control your PVR and more. Take a look at the manual at the link above for more.

I love this idea.  I have a dream of putting one of these on the side of the house by the patio to control my MCE playing through the patio speakers.  I use the remote today but have to keep a keen eye on the little remote control gnome who likes to eat batteries (known as my son).

My wish-list:

• Powered USB - serial is so 1991
• How about an IR receiver built-in?
• Weather-proof enclosure? I can probably do this myself. 

If they release a powered USB version, I just might have to invite my electrician buddy over and do a how-to on this one.  It can be done. Oh yes, it can be done.

Could it be?  Could The Podcast Network be the first group to offer a Media Center Podcasting client? Almost. The beta version of The Podcast Network for Media Center offers a wide range of programming on-demand from where else but The Podcast Network. Ian Dixon has been hard at work on this and released the beta available for download here based on mNewsCenter.

Speaking of which, my friend John Canning was interviewed by Ian in his latest episode of "The Media Center Show". John sounds much too serious in his interview. John is one of the most passionate people I know about his job and his life in general.  I hear next week, my interview with Ian will air as well.  Ian and I had a heck of a time getting Skype to behave but after 1.5 hours and 3 attempts over 3 days, everything came together.  I hope. :)

The time is about right for a full-fledged Podcasting Client in MCE.  We have sync to portable players. Someone will bring together an directory listing optimized for 10' with a download engine and display show notes with album art/photos from the podcast in such a way that makes it compelling in 10' as well as 2'.  It's just bound to happen.  Perhaps what we need to do is a community development project?  Newsgator has a bang-up RSS reader for 10'- it's almost there. Anyone interested or is your company working on a podcasting client we should know about for MCE? Feel free to post here.

Oh and for those who have been asking, sorry, the only comment I have on recent rumors of an update to Media Center is... no comment.  :) I work on Longhorn now but still have a passion for Media Center.

I finally fixed an annoying issue on the site with my CSS page rendering the main body.  Appears I ran into an IE6 bug that was causing the images not to render, but was fine in Firefox.  Guess what, another version of IE didn't have that issue either ;)

Oh and for the gentlemen who keep spamming me and putting random comments in my blog- welcome and enjoy CAPTCHA now that I've turned it back on.  Remember folks, always be smart before clicking on links.

One of my favorite Mac apps (yes you read that right) is iPodderX. It's a great general-purpose RSS client plus a great podcasting client.  Now I've caught wind over on the iPodderX Developer's Journal that iPodderX for Windows is coming very shortly. To quote:

If you're at Gnomedex, you might see a few early versions floating around, so keep an eye out. iPodderX for Windows will be introduced in the next few weeks as a public Beta, so if you’re using a PC, get ready to ROCK!

Way to go iPodderX team and welcome Sean Jackson to the Thunderstone team.  The Podcatchers  on Windows are heating up.  I hope I can get an early build at Gnomedex.

RSS: iPodderX updates

• 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 ;).