My vista media center is in the basement, 1 Xbox in my theater, and 1 in my living room, both are usually powered down due to fan noise and power consumption.

If I decide to watch TV in the living room, I turn the screen on, then turn the xbox on and it goes to the dashboard (after telling me it is an Xbox 360 in a big LOUD unneccesary brainwashing splash screen – duh, my toaster doesn’t announce itself this way, why does my TV?).

Then I need to hit the green button on the remote, wait (a long time) for the media center to be “located” and the media center menu eventually comes up. THEN I need to hit “live TV” and then select a channel.

Talk about a convoluted way to watch TV – this usually takes at least 2 minutes, why not a setting in the Xbox that allows you to boot it directly to live TV or the menu, or to music etc?

I know what you mean, however, whats wrong with paying photogs for their excellent HD images. Surely your not against proper renumeration for work done.

We get gallery player through comcast and I thouroghly enjoy the h res images and am considering buying a dvd of their stuff. The Art photos are real nice on my HD screen.

JB, you are definitely wrong about this. Check out sites like Flickr and Zooomr today and you will see that the photography being produced by the amateurs is every bit as good as what is being sold on GalleryPlayer. In fact, in some cases it’s better.

By creating a vehicle where users can choose to share their photos not just through a website but through MCE as well just makes all the sense in the world.

I’ve hobbled this together myself by using Slickr (an external app using the Flickr API) to download to my PC all of my favorite photos on Flickr. This is not an easy workaround though and for this type of an effort and initiative to have maximum success it should be more built into the MCE platform under a “Discover” section.

There is not sense in paying GalleryPlayer for very good content that you can get for free.

Shahn,

I actually have only used unreleased beta versions of Vista. But if I understand things correctly, even in Vista MCE still runs My Music off of Windows Media Player 11.

If at it’s core Windows Media Center 11 can’t handle my library, then I’m pretty sure that by extension Vista Media Center will have the same trouble.

I may be wrong here and someone from Microsoft feel free to correct me if this is the case, but unless my library works in WMP11, I doubt that it is going to work in Vista. If I’m wrong I’d upgrade to Vista tomorrow because there is actually great value for me personally in being able to access my music library via MCE.

To be fair, my mp3 library is especially large with over 100,000 tracks in it.

Most of these things can be accomplished by addins– something at isn’t really present on any other platform.

dwanderson,

add ins are nice and I’ve long been a fan of the SDK that MSFT ships for MCE. Open APIs and open development platforms are the future for all of software.

But I’m not sure that the type of integration that I’m talking about could technically be done through the SDK, Online Spotlight, etc. What I’m talking about is two new areas in MCE.

1. Merge broadcast TV with subscriptions to niche content both under the My TV menu item. What I’m suggesting is that subscribed video content be treated exactly like subscribed TV content. I should even have some powerful search options for my niche content, like I should be able to get a subscription to any video that mentions the terms Zooomr or Flickr.

2. MCE Discover should be a place where MSFT can highlight new and interesting content for free. This may be difficult for MSFT to overcome as they are somewhat addicted to trying to sell you content, but the concept behind free internet video, free user created photography and music services like Pandora and last FM should rule this area of the service.

Since blogging this I’ve also been made aware of MSN Radio. http://radio.msn.com/

MSN Radio seems awfully close to what Pandora or Last FM are doing. The interesting thing is that I’d never heard of it. Which just goes to show you that even when Microsoft builds things sometimes they lack the ability to effectively get users. This could be the answer for “Discover” music though.

See my post at http://thunor.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!71C238B5E0E3724D!222.entry

[disclaimer, i help make tvtonic]