If you own a Windows Media Center PC, then you already know the powerful capabilities that can be found on the system – from watching and recording live TV to listening to volumes of MP3 music, to watching videos on a television screen stored on a PC on a home network. However, many people probably don’t play with the online applications that are found in the MCE interface. ExtremeTech has a quick look at these pieces and offers up some analysis on the usefulness of the components. You can find it here. My favorite online spotlight item is the MTV Overdrive component which ExtremeTech fails to cover for some reason. The verdict from ExtremeTech?

It’s clear that some of these Online Spotlight providers, like Akimbo, Gallery Player, and MSNTV spent a lot of time thinking about what users do within the WMCE framework. Other applications seem hastily bolted in. Of course, we only spent a couple of days with most of these apps, so we really only scratched the surface. But here’s hoping that the Windows Vista versions of Media Center Edition offer content in a more consistent and easy-to-use manner.

[Check it out]

No Tags