If your looking to increase the cool factor of your Home Theatre PC you could try adding a LCD/VFD display to the case, a few years ago I had one that displayed the CPU temperature and other info and while it looked nice I didn’t get a lot of benefit from it. But there is a new project on Codeplex that could make a case for bringing back the display, MCE_dll is a set of DLLs that enable the status of Windows Media Center to be displayed on a LCD display. The addin works with the TcpIpController project and LCD Smartie which are both free downloads and then you can display things like the current status, the artist of the current tracks, recording started etc. Along with the other features of LCD Smartie you could build up the display to be really usefull
If you have LCD or VFD display I would give this a try, I would be interested to hear how you get on with it, its a new project so the developer is looking to get some feedback. More info and the source code from the codeplex site
The Media Center part is a new project so the developer is still looking for feedback, if you have an LCD/VFD display I would be interested to hear if you have given the addin a try
An LCDSmartie compatible dll which works with TcpIpController to display Windows Media Center information on an LCD Display.
First beta released – working on Windows 7 x64 untested on other operating systems but no reason to doubt it will work.
Have fun and please let me know of any bugs, limitations or suggested improvements.
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