Windows Embedded Blog talks about building a DVR with Windows Embedded

Windows 7 Embedded is a great platform for building an embedded Windows Media Center system but as Ceton found out there is uncertainty to whether Windows 8 embedded will have Media Center as an option. Currently it doesn’t and I suspect that it’s not going to happen. So it was interesting to read on the Microsoft Windows Embedded blog that one of the team there has documented building a DVR using Windows 8 Embedded and Hauppauge WinTV7 and not using Windows Media Center.

The post is a nice step by step guide into building a Embedded system using Windows 8 and the DVR part is using Hauppauge’s software. It’s a shame that Windows Media Center a vastly superior user interface than WinTV7 isn’t used but Media Center isn’t an option in Windows 8 embedded.

If your interested in Windows Embedded its a good guide to help you get started creating your own builds and you can download the template if you want to give it a try yourself.

Here on the Windows Embedded team, we try to do more than just build software, we also “eat our own dog food” and use our software for our everyday work and to emulate possible customer scenarios. Today I wanted to share with you the first post of a small series about how one of our testers is feasting on the dog food…and loving it.

This post was written by me (J.T.), but all the hard work was done by Tien Do, a Software Development Engineer in Test on the Windows Embedded team. Tien is currently working on the Embedded OEM Tools team, which focuses on the embedded developer’s end-to-end scenarios. Before joining the Windows Embedded team, he worked on the Windows Fundamentals team, and before working for Microsoft he worked as a firmware developer for a company in the San Francisco bay area. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, sightseeing and driving on long trips.

Tien took up this work for the same reason that many of us take the time to build something on top of Windows Embedded: to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and understand the end-to-end experience of creating a specialized device. Tien also hoped to find bugs in our product and to be able to create some guidance and a template for other people in our team and for you, the Windows Embedded customer.

To do this, Tien had to take several steps. Some of them may be familiar or the way that you would do things, and some of them may be new or different. However, we hope that showing this process to you will make development on Windows Embedded Standard easier.

For the purposes of this exercise, Tien chose to create a device running WinTV7, because it would be an interesting type of device to have running in his office.

Thanks to Dr Flick for sending the link