OK so Scoble has been blogging about media center so I thinough I'd post some of my experiences getting my Media box all set up.

He asks what do we think?

Well I think that like him I'll be waiting till the next version which looks REALLY cool. Saw plenty of stuff about it @ The MVP summit... but if I told you I'd have to kill you.

So anyway.. wearing my hat I got the chance to eval Media Center 2004... but living down here in lil old New Zealand we don't have any settings in the MCE program guide for our country which meant I couldn't even get the channels to tune :-( I did spend about 7 hours trying to get it going though!

So... I'm waiting for the next version which should be released here to.

In the mean time I have taken the MCE remote that I was sent and coupled it with a couple of other bits of software to build a TV only solution.

I'm using:

• Snapstream Beyond TV to run the TV side of things and;
• Girder to run the remote control against Snapstream.

I have found a NZ TV listings site that is another 'tell you, kill you' sort of deal... but now I have pretty much everything I want in a Media box for the moment. Namely the ability to reduce the time I have to commit to watching the 6pm News from 1hr to about 20 minutes.

The Snapstream setup is pretty cool. Has a web interface for queuing sngs so all the crew here @ Kognition can queue up programs they want to watch and then pick them up over firewire onto their notebooks on the way home each day. I've got a Hauppauge PVR 250 tuner card which is just great. Snapstream have a MCE version of their application that supports movies and pictures and MP3s coming soon so maybe I'll change to that if MCE is still a wee way off. Snapstream also allows easy downsampling of recorded shows automagically into Pocket PC format! Now if I had to commute to work that would be just WIKKID!

Anyway.... the TV box is great- one of the guys I work with called it 'the coolest tech toy I've seen this year'... I'm inclined to agree.