I picked up on this from Ian’s blog but this has got to be one of the best Media Center plug-ins in development at the moment.  If you’re in the uk you’ll have heard of the BBC iPlayer, basically we have a “uniquely” funded broadcaster and they are making much of their content available for free in the UK.

Martin Millmore has created this great plug-in as the beeb have been a bit slow to react to making a Media Center interface for iPlayer, although they have made one available for wii, I must sort that out (not to self).  What I love about this is that its nice and clean and installed really easily.  Lots of the other hacks out there to get this working require the local iPlayer client, this plug-in doesn’t require that as it will display the stream’s that iPlayer offers.

The streams are by the way, watchable, not amazing but not bad either, I was able to watch the Madonna performance at The Big Weekend last week absolutely fine.

There is a minor niggle with the plug-in in that it needs the mouse to start the stream, not a big problem as there is software to make the Media Center remote work as a mouse.

Martin, if you read this post, then there is one improvement I’d like to see…a blue background.

Stuff-em-up-the-hill-backwards has an interesting piece with links etc, on Freesat’s launch today in the UK.

From my point of view I can’t wait to see support for this in Media Center, there are some codec changes that need to occur for MC to be able to view the Sat channels, which I think are MPEG-4.  Hopefully this will come from the Direct-TV changes being made for the US.  This will give us HD TV in Media Center in the UK quite nicely.

Also over the weekend I upgraded my parents Digital Terrestrial aerial with one with a really great, and now VERY highly recommended bit of kit from Maplin.  I bought this unit, Gigaboost, it gives a 16dB boost to the signal and is simply the best Freeview reception I’ve ever seen!!  Installation was fairly simple, following electrocuting myself on a mains cable loose and un-terminated in the loft!  It’s powered mast head amplified unit.