Long’s spotted a great series of advertising by Microsoft in the US that’s got a digital home bent to it so I thought I’d throw it out there.  In Australia Microsoft are sponsoring part of the Open tennis coverage and (very cleverly) using the snap feature to do picture in picture switches between matches.  What a cool idea, never really thought about using it like that to say, watch the news and the Rugby at the same time, but it’s clever…

Anyone else doing that?

Head over to istartedsomething to watch the vid

Wow, talk about a cool way of looking at tweets.  This, my friends, is Seesmic Look, the second output from Seesmic since they’ve started developing closely with Microsoft.  I’ve just downloaded it and started to play, and it’s very sexy looking.  @Loic (runs Seesmic) has just launched the product and you might be thinking “what the hell, this isn’t Media Center related”.  Well it is.

Just like Media Center it’s works brilliantly with the Media Center remote and it’s fully touch enabled.  Super cool.  Developer folks, this is what you can do.

Seesmic Look is designed to be far more consumer friendly than any other Twitter client.  I looks stunning and it focuses on getting Twitter content in front of your eyes.  You can get it here

--Simon May

Techcrunch has an interesting article about Apple moving iTunes into the cloud, it certainly represents and interesting idea.  According to the article the plan is for a fully fledged cloud based iTunes, perhaps removing the need for a local install, certainly it could make purchases a great deal easier over the web.  There’s also the possibility of an API (which our developer community would right, imagine being able to purchase the track from a Media Center interface).

I wonder if we could see a Microsoft, cloud based Media Player or store?

As Brandon just reminded me, there is the Zune store which already is cloud based, yet another thing that Zune has over the iPod / iPhone…unless of course you don’t live in the US or Canada.  I’d love to see a Zune store API too though, I like APIs.

Anyway, a little off topic but lots of us need to use iTunes for those iPods and iPhones…Do you buy from iTunes, would you if it was easier? (I don’t unless I’m mobile and stuck for something to listen to)

--Simon May

Sarah’s written a great and very, very, comprehensive article for On10.net about all the different options for watching TV in Windows Media Center without a TV tuner, she covers:

• Hulu
• PlayOn
• Boxee
• SecondRunTV
• TunerFree
• TubeCore
• ZeeVee
• SkyPlayer

Wow, it’s impressive there are so many options…

Simon May

Sarah’s written a great and very, very, comprehensive article for On10.net about all the different options for watching TV in Windows Media Center without a TV tuner, she covers:

• Hulu
• PlayOn
• Boxee
• SecondRunTV
• TunerFree
• TubeCore
• ZeeVee
• SkyPlayer

Wow, it’s impressive there are so many options…

Simon May

I seem to be getting hooked on the tablets.  No not little pills but the new wave of gadgets we saw at CES and even more by some of the ones that missed CES.  I’ve just spotted this at liliputing.com the HOTT M700 a small tablet (7”) that can output at 1080p and the price point is set for well under $300.

There are downsides, the OS isn’t something Media Center capable, it’s running Windows CE 6.0.  It’s hit me again though.  Custom installers.  This is a very viable home controller with the right app and the price for this could be right.

Head over to Liliputing.com for the video and more specs.

By Simon May

SkyDrive from Microsoft offers everyone 25gb of cloud storage for free, it’s the same space that’s used by Live Photo Gallery to create online photos and it’s exceptionally useful.

If you’re using the Office 2010 beta you’ll find that it’s super simple to publish directly to your SkyDrive and from there you can share with other people or just use it for your own storage.

Those without Office 2010 can also make use of the storage by “mapping a drive” to it, basically assigning a drive letter, just like a USB drive in cloud to it.  First off you’ll need to register if you’ve not then you can download software like Gladinet or SkyDrive explorer.

There’s a new kid on the block today though, Mike Plate has discovered how to connect to SkyDrive directly from Windows 7, no extra software required.  I’ve just tried it and it works a treat!

How to connect to SkyDrive with WebDAV – and my Office 2010 awakening – Mike Plate.

The New York times has an interesting article on how Microsoft are positioning Xbox360 with major content providers, like Disney an ESPN to be a TV device in your living room.  Nothing new there.  Interesting that it’s popped up in the Business section though and interesting that Disney is implicated – a Mr Jobs is on the board over there…

Also interesting is the positioning of interactive TV shows:

In November, Nielsen started to track “1 vs. 100” play and ad views. The pilot program “is the tip of the iceberg,” said Gerardo Guzman, a director for Nielsen Games; eventually, he hopes to generate TV-style ratings.

All in all, interesting stuff.

At the CES keynote yesterday Ballmer unveiled the “beautiful” HP slate and gave it a brief demo using the Amazon kindle application.  Cool stuff.  One thing worth noting is that it’s running Windows 7 and that naturally (depending on the version) means that Media Center is there, and it’s touch enabled and obviously so is Media Center…

So could this be the best PMP (personal media player) ever.  I think it could.

I can imagine being able to sync a whole bunch of media content to it (Mesh anyone?) and then be able to access everything on the go, or even using Internet Streaming from within Windows Media Player.  What’s more the screen size looks good enough to watch a movie on if you were in the back of the car (ala cheapo DVD player attached to the back of the drivers headrest) or on a plane.

I’m going to be keeping an eye on slate PCs for exactly that reason, rather than being great eBook readers, which the undoubtedly will be, they’ll be great portable media devices.  The key thing is going to be battery life here so we’ll have to see what other vendors put out in this space.

What do you think, do you see a slate becoming a great PMP?  Did anyone love the original Media Center PMPs? 

Here’s the teaser video:

Now that Martin has released the beta of Spotify MCE I thought I’d explain quickly how you can stream Spotify all over your house.  I use a Squeezebox for this, which is where the solution comes from, but equally anything that can play a HTTP MP3 stream will work.  That includes Windows Media Player, your iPhone, your Windows Mobile or whatever…

Searching the Squeezebox forums I came across this thread which talks about a little bit of software called DSBridge.  The download details are in the thread but it’s really simple to install and it’s worked flawlessly for me for a couple of months.  Here’s what you do:

1. Download dsbridge. (it’s in the thread linked above)
2. Extract the dll file into my Spotify folder (c:\program files\spotify)
3. Get lame_enc.dll and also put it in the Spotify folder.
4. Restart Spotify - and start playing a track (I put the volume to zero in Spotify).
5. On my Boombox I connected to http://192.168.0.199:8124 (the IP of my computer) and VOILA - It plays music!

[taken from ted1001’s post]

Now you can open the stream anywhere on your network (or you can forward the port and stream over the internet if you want).  What happens here is DSBridge steals the output from the DirectSound API and streams it over HTTP, so the sound output stops from the machine running Spotify.  It is possible to have more than one output open the HTTP stream though…

TIP: It also streams the album art and song details to Squeezebox!

TIP: Also it works to do the same thing with iTunes (i.e. stream your library over HTTP)

So there you have it, download and try.