Phil Torrone over at MAKE Magazine should do an article on this one.  Via Alexander Grundner at eHomeUpgrade, the in-dash Media Center-capable PCs are coming. As he notes (via engadget):

Details are still coming out (mostly due to translation issues Korean language + Flash files = pain in the ass), but various sites have been able to deduce that the INFILL T3 is powered by a 1.0 or 1.6Ghz CPU and offers 40GB of storage, DVD drive, TV tuner, GPS, voice control, USB, remote, and one empty mini PCI slot (where's the Wi-Fi?). Moreover, the T3 is either pre-loaded with Windows XP and/or can be upgraded to MCE. Again, details are forthcoming, so don't shoot the messenger

I'd love to put one of these bad boys in my car but it won't fit. Meanwhile, I'm trading in my cherished Honda "I want a sportscar before kids and my midlife crisis" S2000  for a Toyota "I'm a responsible parent toting the kids to Gymboree" Prius.  Maybe I can hack it to add Media Center? We'll see..

RSS: MAKE Blog
RSS: eHome Upgrade Top Stories

A bit belated due to my being on a blogging break, we've heard from our friends in London that they're safe and sound in the aftermath of last week's bombings. The fact doesn't diminish the sincere empathy we feel for those who suffered or lost loved ones. Nor does it diminish our conviction that we must continue to move forward in the face of, as British PM Tony Blair put it, "barbaric" acts.  United we stand. 

It seems every time I upgrade my media center, this happens. Sure, I can go for a year,  maybe longer without any major developments, but with the advent of dual-core processors, I find myself wanting.  Never is that more true than with HP's new Media Center PCs including the new Athlon64 X2 Dual-core processor.  Sure, MCE isn't native 64-bit today (but start asking your hardware manufacturers about drivers for the future) but you'll still get great performance.  I don't even mind that these look like Apple.  White and silver are the "new" black.  How long until Black is the new white and silver again?  I give it 10 months... tops.

Update: Thanks to Brian Hoyt for pointing out I was baited on this one. While HP's site says clearly "From $799.00 (after rebate)*" and directly underneath calls out "Powerful Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core" the combination of fine print and their configurator for purchase adds over $500 for the dual-core, putting the price at over $1300.  Ouch.

Catfish as large as a Grizzly bear caught in Mekong River.  646 pounds! Reports that the fishermen waterskiied behind it are unsubstantiated.

While we were at Gnomedex, Erwin at Doppler Radio pre-announced version 3.0, including details that he's adding more support for WM Player into my favorite Podcatching client, Doppler:

Doppler 3.0 will now auto-install smart playlists, showing you the latest podcasts you downloaded. Doppler 3.0 will include a Windows Media Player plugin that will auto-start Doppler (if not already running) when you start Windows Media Player and will start downloading the latest podcasts automatically (this will be configurable).

The Doppler 3.0 interface has been upgraded, including a new RSS reader pane, allowing you to read the posts in the RSS feed without even leaving the Doppler interface. We now also support ‘background’ downloads, leveraging the same technology Windows uses to download upgrades (it’s called BITS). And there’s so much more.

Very cool! I wonder if Erwin will pick up the Auto Playlists I wrote earlier this year for Doppler 2.0 (and other podcatchers)?

IMO, Podcasting or Audio Blogging, like RSS shouldn't be owned by any one company or individual.  Some of you might like this little resource that just popped up recently in that spirit.  It's great to see folks taking advantage of the platforms that exist to approach this from many angles.  No one angle is "right", perceptions may be shifted.

Speaking of shifted perceptions, after playing with Delicious Monster's Delicious Library this weekend, and I get it now.  I used my DV camcorder to scan almost everything in the house with a barcode. My wife was complaining that, "I was having all the fun" scanning.  My read is that she was having flashbacks to scanning wedding presents at the Macy's and saw she could do that at home.  182 DVDs scanned in 30 minutes  Now I just want an easy way to export my library to a webpage and I'm a happy camper. Next stop, Sean's personal NetFlix for family, neighbors and friends? 7 days late on returning a rental and I don't claim it as a purchase (ahem Blockbuster's smarmy "No more late fees" promotion), I'll just claim your lawnmower. :)

Steve Rubel is right-on IMO.  This picture of Dean Hachomovitch's sneaker from the AP sums up the news at Gnomedex for me. Dean is General Manager of Microsoft's Longhorn Browsing and RSS technologies team, a long-time co-worker of my wife (who was on the Longhorn team before leaving for a startup called our son).  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, Alex Barnett offers a good roundup.

For me, the lessons at Gnomedex can be boiled down to the three "C"s of "Communication, Collaboration, and Compromise".  When folks like Dave Winer, Lawrence Lessig, and frankly many people at Microsoft including Dean's team see the greater good that can come from opening lines of communication, collaborating  and acknowledging up-front that certain, smaller compromises will have to be made in order to achieve the greater good, stellar things can happen.  A lot of people were afraid to take the risk. I would argue it's been a smashing success. What's even better, updates are already happening to the proposed extensions released under the Creative Commons license- based on feedback from those at the event.

And Adam Curry can be both an engaging and inspirational speaker when he wants to be.  He's been studying Steve Jobs by his own admission. 

To my family - don't worry- you don't need to know what this means right now other than that it's going to make you more productive in your daily life. More to come at the PDC which is gearing up to be a really good show this year.

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 :( )