Windows Media Center at CES 2010

I thought it would be good to recap on the Windows Media Center news and sights over the last couple of day. First off in the keynote Steve Ballmer gave Media Center a good 8 minutes of airtime which is more than has been in the last couple of years and the main new announcements seem to be Media Room 2.0 integration, new tuners and the TV powered by the PC.

The Media Room integration is interesting as if your a Media Room user Windows Media Center becomes a kind of extender for system so you could have Media Room in the living room and in the kitchen Windows Media Center could be used to watch the premium content provided by Media Room. I know a lot of readers have been asking for this integration and Microsoft’s Ben Reed will explain this in more detail on a future podcast

The new tuners are interesting for US users. Silicon Dust have announced a CableCARD enabled HD Homerun, it takes a single CableCARD and coax cable and is a dual tuner. Having the networked based tuner means that a tuner is not tied to one PC and with the plethora of low cost small form factor PCs you can have live TV in any room with Windows Media Center and you don’t suffer the limitations of Extenders. Microsoft where showing the new quad CableCARD tuner from Ceton which is built into a single PCI-e card which is another great option for CableCARD users.

Avermedia have some interesting tuner solutions including a HD capture unit box not unlike the HD-PVR and an internal software version, both enabled capture of HD video using the “analogue hole” and could be used to get set top box content into Media Center

3D is massive at CES and almost everyone is showing some kind of 3D solution. Windows Media Center gets in on the act via Arcsoft and Nvidia with a surprisingly simple solution using shutter glasses and 120hz screens. Basically if you have the right nVidia chipset and a screen capable of running at 120hz it should work. I interviewed Nvida so you can here the exact equipments on next week show, I also interviewed Arcsoft who give more details on the software needed for 3D

While walking the south hall I noticed a few nice remote control ideals, one of them was a standard Media Center remote that you could turn over and it had two track pads on it so you could as multi-touch input for Windows 7. Another was a small keyboard that had used motion sensing for mouse movement, a neat solution of controlling the PC on the TV

There seemed to be a lot of interest in Media Center at Microsoft’s booth with plenty of people lining up to talk to the Microsoft people, the tuner news and the range of small form factor PCs that are available mean that its easier than ever to setup Windows Media Center and use it around the home. It was also fun to chat with people about Media Center at Microsoft’s booth, there is a lot of interest from people looking to cut their cable bill and use Media Center’s Internet TV services

So a positive show for Media Center, nothing revolutionary but building on the existing platform. As well as 3D it was interesting to see DLNA everywhere at CES but that is a topic for another post.

Here are a selection of Media Center related photos from the last couple of days