Great design is something I’m into, I love things looking beautiful and I’m a believer in the need for form to follow (actually to lead) function.  Having come across this it’s something I just had to share.

The image on the left is a one box media center (notice the small m & c) that incorporates everything you need (one obvious exception) to enjoy your entertainment experience.  The one box incorporates the speaker, the TV, the media player – BluRay and all the wires and fuss.  That’s superb design.

Oh yeah and it turns into the picture below, and it can even store your CDs and DVDs in original format.

The only thing that would make this better is if it actually held a Media Center.

It’s from a collection by Boxetti that includes beds, offices and kitchens all collapsible to boxes.  Perfect if your a serious minimalist or live in a very small house or even a container.

The price tag is only Euro 5520 or about $7550 or £4989

So, has anyone developed something similar themselves?

[via Doornob]

Ok I was watching Steve B speech at Washington U yesterday and heard this…it shocked me a little and I tweeted it…people picked it up and found it interesting so here it is, it’s take from Microsoft’s transcript of the event:

In the case of the TV we've got both strategies. We actually have a TV implementation in some senses built into Windows. It works really well for small screen TVs that you might call a PC, but for that big screen device here's a piece of hardware that we build, there's no diversity. You get exactly the Xboxes that we build for you. We may have more form factors in the future that are designed for various price points and options, but we think it's going to important.

Now to say something about this.  It doesn’t matter folks.  He was addressing a question about strategy and placing things in boxes that most people understand and he’d just show off SkyTV on the Xbox.  Steve was demonstrating how far ahead of the pack they are with their TV strategy and with Media Center being a poster boy (yes the above quote does that) it’s not going anywhere any time soon.  It might change a bit, I dunno.

What I do know is that we have the best TV experience anywhere and I love Media Center.

(controversially I also think Steve B is doing a great job leading Microsoft’s leaders – this is the best Microsoft yet)

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

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.

In the last few hours Twitter has made a very cool feature available to all, lists.  Yep, a list.  Why is that cool?  Well it makes it really simple to share tweets from people who know something cool about a subject, like er Windows Media Center.

I’ve created this list WindowsMediaCenterExperts and I’m intending to gather up all the experts so you can find out what they’re talking about in one place (other than thedigitallifestyle.com obviously!)

I need your help it’s very incomplete, and it right now only includes a few people from my list who I could spot in the 10 minutes I have before I get to the office.  So what I want you to do is to nominate people to be on the list to me on Twitter by Twitter name in a DM or a @reply.

This list should be really useful to us all, thanks for the help.

[EDIT: Folks it looks like I jumped the gun, and the feature isn’t there for all.  That said I can still build this list for us so send me your experts!]

Ian tweeted Friday about a TV show in the UK called Newswipe, unfortunately just a day after the series ended.  Now I know that I can catch up on it using TunerFree MCE but I wanted to make sure that I don’t miss it again – it’s funny, but it’s already gone off the air, so it’s not in the guide.  So I fired out a tweet asking the community on twitter what I could do.

And it turns out that there’s a simple fix, thanks to @datbasejase and @the_ape for suggesting this.  Doing a keyword search it’s still possible to add the show, and next time it comes it on air it’ll be recorded automatically…can a set top box (thinking about a specific popular UK DVR here) do that…no!

Anyway I’ve set it up to record now, and this is how you can too…

How to…

1 Start Media Center and go to Recorded TV then go to Add recording and you’ll get a screen showing different ways to add a recording, select Keyword
2 Next decide how to track the program down, I’m going to use title since I know the title, but you could use this method to record every program containing the keyword “Wine” if you like your wine.
3 Next enter the name of the program that you want to catch, “newswipe” in this case and select the Use: “newswipe” button.
4 Setting the nuances of how exactly the recording will happen is next, including how often to record the show and when to delete it, click Record when done.
5 Finally confirm everything with the Ok button on this screen.

Now, when you catch the last episode of a great series, you can make sure you don’t miss the first episode of the next series.

Posted by Simon May, follow me on Twitter or if you like email me

Just thought you’d like to know that I’ve just posted my first blog entry to my blog on The Digital Lifestyle.

I’ve also just put up a review of TunerFree MCE.

I’m now going to move most of my Media Center related posts over to my blog on The Digital Lifestyle, but you’ll always be able to see the posts in my friend feed to the left.