Media Center, Media Player 11

The Center of Media

Windows Media Center is an application designed to serve as an all in one home-entertainment hub for Windows users. Instead of it being a separate operating system as it was in the past, Microsoft decided to integrate it into higher-end editions of Windows Vista (included in Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate). This gives consumers the ability to use the traditional Media Center environment and still enjoy the great benefits of the much improved Windows Vista. And when it comes to the features of the Media Center nothing was left behind. In fact, Microsoft has implemented several new enhancements.

The built in Media Center has more support for handling large music collections than in previous versions. Performance improvements have also dramatically improved Media Center’s ability to find and display your music and video collections on screen in an organized manner. Additionally, built in networking support allows you to listen to FM/Internet Radio, search and share music with another Windows PC on your network, or stream music directly to Windows Media Center Extender capable devices such as the Xbox 360. Windows Vista supports up to five media center extenders.

Got movies? Good. Windows Media Center has the ability to play high definition movies right off your hard disk. If you have a tuner card, you can watch live television or even record shows for later viewing. With two tuner cards you can watch TV on one channel while recording a TV program on another. And when you start to fill up your hard drives with gigs and gigs worth of movies, you can start burning movies onto DVDs or archiving them for later use.

Another new feature Microsoft has built-in to Windows Vista is CableCard support. This will allow the Media Center in Vista to be compatible with digital cable providers like Comcast or Time Warner without the need for a dedicated set-top unit. (Microsoft is still hashing out the final details on this with cable providers, but it looks like this may ultimately end up being an OEM-only option, meaning that DIY’ers who build their own Vista PCs from scratch may not be able to build a CableCard-compliant system.)

Along those same lines, earlier this year Microsoft signed an agreement with DirecTV that “will enable the flow of high-quality digital content between Windows-based PCs, DIRECTV set-top boxes, PlaysForSure devices and the Xbox 360 system”. In theory, this could potentially allow DirecTV subscribers to use their PC as their satellite receiver. End users could then stream recorded or live content from their PC to other compatible devices in the home, such as an Xbox 360 game console.

These features could come particularly handy for recording HD content. Up to this point, HD support was limited to just over-the-air broadcasts. This limits support to the major networks, such as CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX. With these new features, premium channels that broadcast in HD such as HBO, Showtime, ESPN, and TNT will become available.

Media Player 11

For those of you who prefer good old Media Player, don’t worry, you have not been left out. Windows Media Player 11 was released as an upgrade in Windows XP replacing Media Player 10. Windows Vista comes with Media Player 11 standard.

The first thing that you will notice is the new interface of Media Player 11. It has a big “play” button centered at the bottom of the window surrounded by the rest of the common controls. The common tasks are at the very top centered also, making it easy to navigate to and from different tabs depending on what you need to do. The feature that stands out the most is the new library view. This view organizes albums from top to bottom listing album information under a picture of the album’s cover, and then listing all of the available tracks to the right of the cover. All in all, the new Media Player has been restructured to make navigation easier for the consumer.

Let’s move on to Internet Explorer 7 and Parental Controls!