Digital Media in the Living Room: Windows Media Center

Although Microsoft has been criticized for taking so long to bring Windows Vista to market, the truth is that the software giant wasn’t idle during the several-year wait between Windows XP and Windows Vista. One of the most innovative technologies Microsoft added to Windows during this time period is Media Center, a wonderful, remote control–accessible front end to all of your digital media content - live and recorded TV, videos, photos, and music - that is equally at home in your living room or bedroom as it is in the home office. In Windows Vista, the Media Center environment has been made available in two mainstream versions of the operating system and will thus reach a far wider audience than it did previously. In this article, we examine Microsoft’s answer for the living room, Media Center.

A Short History of Media Center In January 2002, shortly after the release of Windows XP, Microsoft announced that it was working on software, then code-named Freestyle, that would extend the reach of Windows into the living room. Freestyle, which was eventually renamed to Windows XP Media Center Edition, was really just Windows XP Professional with a Media Center application and various Media Center–related services added on top. Media Center, the application, was and is a user interface designed for use with a remote control (although it works fine with a mouse and keyboard too) and what Microsoft calls the ten-foot user interface. (If you’re curious, Microsoft refers to the standard way of interacting with a PC as the two-foot interface.) The original Media Center version included all of the basic features we’ve come to associate with Media Center in the intervening years. It supported a simple menu-based user interface with options for recording TV, watching live TV, controlling cable set-top boxes via a so-called IR blaster, and enjoying digital media experiences like music, pictures, videos, and DVD movies (  13-1). Windows XP Media Center shipped in October 2002 and was available only with select Media Center PCs. Not surprisingly, the software was well received by reviewers, but it didn’t sell very well because Media Center PCs were relatively expensive, and setting up TV tuner cards to work with cable signals was difficult. The second version of Windows XP Media Center Edition, code-named Harmony, shipped a year later as XP Media Center Edition 2004. This version was also available only with new PCs and added support for FM radio tuner cards, online services, and functionality that Microsoft had previously left to the two-foot experience, like CD ripping. As you might expect, the product also included various UI and performance improvements as well.

In late 2004, Microsoft shipped the most extensive Media Center update, Windows XP

Media Center Edition 2005, code-named Symphony. This version sported dramatic user interface improvements with a scrolling main menu with a pop-up for most-recently accessed items, a much simpler setup experience, vastly improved TV picture quality with fewer MPEG-2 compression artifacts, and support for up to three TV tuners, one of which can be an over-the-air (OTA) HDTV tuner. Microsoft also added support for Media Center Extenders, hardware devices that resemble set-top boxes and allow you to remote the Media Center experience via your home network to other TVs in the house: That way, you can be watching a live TV show on one TV, with an Extender, and watching a recorded TV show on a different TV, using the Media Center PC. Media Center 2005 supported up to five Extenders, depending on the capabilities of the hardware on which the system resided. Microsoft also shipped Media Center Extender software for its Xbox video game console, allowing that device to be used like a dedicated Media Center Extender. Although late 2005 didn’t see a major Media Center release, Microsoft did ship a Media Center update that year, ignominiously named Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Update Rollup 2 (UR2). This free update added support for the Xbox 360 and its Media Center Extender functionality, a feature called Away Mode that let newer Media Center PC models with modern power management features move quickly between on and off states that more closely resemble TV sets than PCs, DVD changer support, a new DVD burning utility, and support for up to four TV tuners (two of which can be standard definition, and two of which can be OTA HDTV tuners). UR2 also added a wonderful new Zoom feature that helps make 4:3 TV pictures look better on wide-screen displays, support for digital radio, and various bug fixes and performance improvements. XP Media Center Edition 2005 UR2 is shown in article 13-2.

Aside from the actual products that were rolled out over these years, Microsoft made some of its biggest improvements to Media Center from a marketing standpoint. Although the Media Center software was never released as a standalone add-on for all Windows users, Microsoft dropped the price of this XP version and stopped requiring PC makers to ship it only with new PCs that included TV tuners. Thus, over the years, Media Center quickly became one of the best-selling XP versions, and it’s now installed on millions of PCs worldwide. Many Media Center users don’t use the TV functionality at all, in fact, but use the software just to view digital media. Today, Media Center is a mature product that’s benefited greatly from years of feedback.

Media Center in Windows Vista With Windows Vista, Microsoft has made some big changes to Media Center. First, the software is no longer available only in a single special Windows Media Center product, although unfortunately, you still can’t purchase Media Center separately from Windows. Now, you get Media Center with two different Windows Vista versions: Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate. If you’re using Windows Vista Home or Business editions, you can upgrade to a Media Center–compatible version of Windows Vista by using the Windows Anytime Upgrade service. We discuss this service in Article 1.

In any event, from a high-level standpoint, Media Center has been changed in Windows Vista to be more intuitive and obvious. If you’re used to previous Media Center versions, the changes will be a little jarring. But Microsoft hopes the new user interface will help users find the content they want more quickly, with less navigating (and remote control button pushing). At a low-level, Media Center has been architected to be more scalable, so that Microsoft’s partners can more easily extend Media Center to do more. This will result in more and better online experiences, applications, and other software that works both with and within Media Center. Third, Media Center now supports a technology called CableCard which, although not widely available at the time of this writing, will allow specially manufactured Media Center PCs to directly control cable systems without a jury-rigged IR blaster and cable set-top box. What CableCard does is replace a cable box with a card that is plugged directly into the computer. It’s a great idea, especially for anyone who’s had to suffer through the performance issues incurred by IR blasting. Finally, there’s a fourth major change. The version of Media Center in Windows Vista will not work with first-generation Media Center Extender devices, including the softwarebased version that shipped for the original Xbox. Instead, you will need to use an Xbox 360 or a new lineup of second-generation Extender-enabled devices, including set-top boxes, televisions, and DVD players. We’ll examine Media Center’s Extender capabilities later in this article.

In any event, from a high-level standpoint, Media Center has been changed in Windows Vista to be more intuitive and obvious. If you’re used to previous Media Center versions, the changes will be a little jarring. But Microsoft hopes the new user interface will help users find the content they want more quickly, with less navigating (and remote control button pushing). At a low-level, Media Center has been architected to be more scalable, so that Microsoft’s partners can more easily extend Media Center to do more. This will result in more and better online experiences, applications, and other software that works both with and within Media Center. Third, Media Center now supports a technology called CableCard which, although not widely available at the time of this writing, will allow specially manufactured Media Center PCs to directly control cable systems without a jury-rigged IR blaster and cable set-top box. What CableCard does is replace a cable box with a card that is plugged directly into the computer. It’s a great idea, especially for anyone who’s had to suffer through the performance issues incurred by IR blasting. Finally, there’s a fourth major change. The version of Media Center in Windows Vista will not work with first-generation Media Center Extender devices, including the softwarebased version that shipped for the original Xbox. Instead, you will need to use an Xbox 360 or a new lineup of second-generation Extender-enabled devices, including set-top boxes, televisions, and DVD players. We’ll examine Media Center’s Extender capabilities later in this article.

Microsoft doesn’t like to talk about it, but a number of features have been removed from Media Center, and first-generation Extender support is only the beginning. In this version, Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger integration was removed because the Messenger interfaces no longer ship as part of the operating system. (Thanks a lot, U.S. Department of Justice!) Caller ID has also been removed. This feature used to enable users to connect their phone line through the PC; when a phone call arrived, the Caller ID information would pop-up onscreen so you could decide whether to pause TV or whatever before getting off the couch to grab the phone. Fortunately, there are all kinds of Caller ID add-ons for Media Center available online. To find one you like, try

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=caller+id+media+center&FORM=QBHP.

Configuring Media Center Before you do anything in Media Center, you should configure it to work with your PC’s display and sound system, Internet connection, and, if present, your TV signal. Unlike any other Windows Vista feature, Media Center configuration is a bit time consuming and requires you to be prepared. Unless you’ve done this before, plan on spending about an hour configuring Media Center the first time. The first time you launch Media Center, you will see a Media Center–style dialog box - 13-3 - asking you whether you’d like to configure these features via an Express or Custom method. You can also optionally choose to run setup later. Express setup will utilize the default settings. Generally speaking, we do not recommend allowing Microsoft to configure any of its software with the company’s default settings, so our advice is to skip this option. If you do choose the Express setup, Media Center will be configured to download media information from the Internet and perform other Internetbased tasks you may not approve of. If you choose the Custom setup - which roughly lines up with the Setup experience used by previous Media Center versions - you will need to step through the Media Center Setup Wizard manually. We recommend you choose this option: Even if you ultimately choose the options Microsoft would have configured for you automatically in Express options, at least this way you know exactly what happened.

Media Center will actually enable you to skip the configuration stage and configure Media Center settings later. To do so, click the Setup Later button.

Running the Setup Wizard To configure Media Center correctly, choose Custom in the Welcome to Media Center dialog we described in the previous section. This launches the Media Center Setup Wizard, which runs in full-screen mode, 13-4.

The wizard steps you through the various options Media Center needs to run correctly, including your Internet connection (which includes a Join Wireless Network Wizard if you utilize a wireless connection), whether you’d like to join Microsoft’s Customer Experience Program to help the company improve Media Center, and so on. We’ll explain these steps as you continue in this article. There are two parts of the wizard you’ll want to pay special attention to. The first is the page that asks about the Customer Experience Program (Help Improve Windows Media Center). In this phase of Setup, Microsoft is asking you to have your computer automatically send anonymous reports about Media Center performance and reliability to the company over the Internet. In general, this is a nice thing to do because your Media Center experience will be aggregated with that of other Media Center users around the world to help find and fix issues with the software. But if you’re a privacy aficionado and not particularly trusting of Microsoft, you may want to simply choose No Thank You and move on. Right after the Customer Experience Program phase, you’ll see a Get The Most From Windows Media Center screen. Here, you will be asked whether you’d like to let Media Center connect automatically to the Internet to automatically download music information, album art, and other data. Back in Article 10, you may recall that we recommended

being very careful about allowing Microsoft to do this, and that advice applies here as well: If you have carefully crafted your ripped CD metadata, you might want to select No here. If, however, your digital media files are in need of some help - that is, you don’t have album art associated with each of your ripped CD albums - you might want to choose Yes. Media Center’s interface is very visual in Windows Vista, and it relies on displaying graphical representations of your digital media. After this, you’ll be told that the required components have been set up. Now, it’s time to move on to the optional phase of setup. Here, you will configure your tuners, TV signal and program guide (if your PC has one or more TV tuners installed), and your display, speakers, and media libraries. Our advice here is simple: If you are going to be using Media Center at all, especially for watching and recording TV, you really need to take the time to go through each of these steps.

Configuring TV If your PC includes at least one TV tuner card that is connected to a TV signal of some sort, refer to your Media Center PC’s or TV tuner card’s documentation for information on setting up the required hardware. Then you can configure Media Center to access and record televisions shows, as follows:

1. Configure the TV signal, and the wizard will initially ask you to confirm the region in which you live (United States in our cases). At that point, Media Center downloads TV setup options that are specific to your region. In case it’s not obvious, yes, that means you must have a live Internet connection in order to configure TV within Media Center. In fact, Media Center relies on an Internet connection to keep its program guide, through which it displays the available TV shows at any given time, up to date. Although it’s possible but not advisable to turn off the PC’s Internet connection once you’ve configured its TV features, you will absolutely have to be connected to the Internet to complete this part of Setup.

2. Choose between automatic and manual TV signal configuration. In our experience, automatic configuration works best when you’re connected to a TV signal via a cable set-top box and are using IR blasting in order to control the box’s channel changing functionality. Meanwhile, manual configuration works better for a direct TV connection, where a TV cable comes out of the wall and connects directly to your TV tuner card (that is, there is no set-top box). Since the manual method always works, we’ll cover that here. Choose the I Will Manually Configure My TV Signal option, and then click Next.

3. In the next screen, you choose what type of TV signal you get: Cable, Satellite, or Antenna. If you choose Cable or Satellite, you’re asked whether you have a set-top box. If you do, Setup will walk you through a series of steps in which you configure the system to control your set-top box so that you can change channels, raise and lower the volume, and perform other actions from within Media Center and using the Media Center remote control. If you don’t have a set top box, you can simply skip that part.

4. After configuring the system to use a set-top box, choose whether to use the program guide, which provides always-updated TV program listings that are specific to your cable system. Because using the guide requires Media Center to connect to Microsoft servers, you must okay this choice. Unlike some of the other Media Center options, this one is a no-brainer: If you are going to use Media Center for TV, you absolutely must enable this feature. We’ll look at the program guide later in this article.

5. Next, configure Media Center to work with your particular TV system. After you enter your ZIP code (in the United States), Media Center downloads a list of TV providers that match the type of TV signal you selected earlier. Pick the one that matches the service you receive and then Media Center will download the program guide for that service.

Media Center downloads about two weeks’ worth of program guide at a time. The first time you do this, it will take a few minutes. But in the future, the guide download will occur in the background, and you won’t even be aware it’s happening. In this way, the program guide will always be up to date.

Configuring the Display In the Display Configuration phase, you will optimize Media Center for your display. Media Center natively supports these display types:

PC Monitor: For a CRT monitor connected via a VGA cable

Built-In Display: For a notearticle computer

Flat Panel: For a flat panel monitor connected via a VGA or DVI cable

Television: For any type of TV connected via composite, S-video, DVI, VGA, HDMI, or component cable

Projector: For a dedicated projector connected via composite, S-video, DVI, VGA, HDMI, or component cable Choose the correct connection type, based on how your system is physically connected to the display. Consult your Media Center PC’s documentation if you’re not sure which display and connection types are employed. This step is important, because Media Center will attempt to optimize the video output based on which choices you make. Ensure that you’re using the highest-quality connection type. In rough order of quality, from worst to best, the choices are composite, S-Video, VGA, DVI, HDMI. If you’re using a built-in display, like that on a notearticle computer, you really don’t have any options.

After you’ve chosen the display and connection types, the wizard will prompt you to choose the Display Width (really, the aspect ratio) of your display. You have two choices: Standard (4:3) and Widescreen (16:9). Again, if you’re not sure what to choose here, consult your display’s documentation. The wizard will then check the system and prompt you about the resolution of the display. You can accept the value it provides (which you should do if it is correct) or select No. If you choose the latter option, you will be presented with a list of possible display resolutions, based on the capabilities of your display and whether you’re using a wide-screen aspect ratio. On a high-end HDMI-based HDTV display, for example, you might see choices like 1920×1200, 1080p (59.95Hz), 1680×1050, 1440×900, 1360×768, and so on. In general, you should choose the highest resolution your display supports in order to get the best picture quality. Next, you can optionally configure your display’s controls, including calibrating the display’s onscreen centering and sizing, aspect ratio, brightness, contrast, and RGB color balance. These controls are less important on VGA, DVI, and HDMI connections, but analog connections like composite and S-Video will often benefit from some fine-tuning.

Configuring Sound In the third part of the optional phase of Media Center Setup, you will configure the number of speakers you have and test your setup to ensure all of the speakers are working correctly. Vista’s version of Media Center supports three speaker configurations: two speakers (stereo), 5.1 surround sound (two front speakers, two rear speakers, and a center speaker), or 7.1 surround sound (two front speakers, two rear speakers, two side speakers, and a center speaker). Choose the configuration that most closely matches your hardware, click Next, and then click Test to test the speakers. If you don’t hear the test sound in some or all of the speakers, the wizard will help you troubleshoot. Media Center’s speaker setup is quite a bit more limited than the speaker configuration options you get in Windows Vista’s Control Panel. There, you can configure mono, stereo, quadraphonic, 5.1, and 7.1 speaker setups. You configure your speakers in Control Panel by opening the Start Menu and navigating to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Audio Devices and Sound Themes -> Manage audio devices (  13-5).

Configuring Your Digital Media Libraries In the next phase, you can configure your Music, Pictures, and Videos libraries. More specifically, you configure which shell folders that Media Center will watch or monitor for content. Media Center actually monitors the same folders you configure as Monitor Folders in Windows Media Player 11, which we discuss in Article 10. So if you configured Monitor Folders in Windows Media Player, there’s no reason to do it here as well. Folders you configure as Monitor Folders in Windows Media Player are watched by Media Center as well. But the reverse is also true: If you configure Media Center to watch certain folders, those changes will be reflected in Windows Media Player, too.

Configuring Media Center Features after Setup After you’re done configuring Windows Media Center with the Setup Wizard, you’ll be presented with the Media Center menu system or, as we like to call it, Start screen. This is shown in article 13-6.

We examine the finer points of this user interface in the next section. But for now, we’d like to discuss how you can configure Media Center after completing the Setup Wizard. Some of the configuration information you’ll see directly corresponds to features you configured in the wizard (or even runs part of the wizard in some cases). But you can access many more Media Center features from outside the wizard. For this reason, it’s important to step through the Media Center Settings feature to make sure the system is configured exactly the way you want it. You can actually access Settings from virtually anywhere in Media Center, but the simplest method is to navigate to the Start screen (press the Start button on the screen or the remote) and then choose Tasks and then Settings. Shown in article 13-7, Settings includes links to several major areas.

There’s little need to walk you through each and every feature. Instead, in the Secrets that follow we’ll highlight new options, those options that contain unlikely benefits and the options you should absolutely consider changing.

General If you are using Media Center as the main interface to your TV in the living room, do the following: 1. Navigate into General -> Startup and Window Behavior. 2. Select the Windows Media Center Window Always On Top option. 3. Select the Start Windows Media Center When Windows Starts option. 4. Disable Show Taskbar Notifications, because you’ll likely never see the Windows taskbar anyway. Got kids? Use the Parental Controls feature to access a suite of excellent ratings-based limitations that will prevent your children from viewing TV shows, DVD movies, or movies that surpass your limits. You input a four-digit code to unlock these shows for yourself. Parental controls can be found in General -> Parental Controls. Media Center includes an unintentionally hilarious but useful optimization kludge: In General -> Optimization, you can configure Media Center to reboot every morning at 4:00 a.m. (or any other time). This clears out any problems and is especially useful for people who use a Media Center as their TV interface. No, it’s not elegant, but it does work wonders for stability.

TV If you’re hearing impaired, you can enable Closed Captioning, which was significantly improved in this version, in TV, Closed Captioning. Closed Captioning can be on, off, or on when muted. Naturally, the quality of the actual captioning is dependent on the content creators who, unfortunately, have no federal requirements related to accuracy.

Picture Be sure to change at least two options in the Picture settings. First, enable Show Pictures In Random Order for better slide shows. Then, consider changing the transition time from 12 seconds to something smaller, like 5 seconds.

A Somewhat New User Interface Prior to Windows Vista, Media Center presented most of its menus using lists of text that were formatted to be readable on TV displays. In keeping with more visual style of Windows Vista, however, the new Media Center version is more graphical and takes better advantage of the onscreen real estate offered by wide-screen displays such as HDTV sets. This interface may be a bit jarring if you’re used to using previous Media Center versions, but others should find themselves able to adopt the new user interface fairly easily. The main Media Center menu, or Start screen, was shown back in article 13-6. From here, you scroll up or down to access primary options like TV + Movies, Music, Pictures + Videos, Tasks, Shutdown, and Online Media. But you also scroll left and right to access subchoices within each primary option. For example, if TV + Movies is selected, you can move left and right to access options like More TV, Recorded TV, Live TV, Guide, Movies Guide, Play DVD, and Search. (If TV is not configured, you might see a Setup TV option as well.) Throughout the Media Center interface, you will run into these types of horizontally scrolling menu choices, so it’s a good idea to get used to them by experimenting with the Start screen. How you navigate through the interface will depend on whether you’re using the keyboard, mouse, or Media Center remote control (which you might have gotten with your PC). Each can be used. In Table 13-1, we summarize how you access the most common Media Center navigational options with each controller type.

One feature you can access only with the mouse is the new controls overlay that appears when you move the mouse around while Media Center displays. Shown in article 13-8, these controls provide you with access to the Back and Start buttons plus a nice set of playback controls perfect for music, TV, videos, or other multimedia content.

Previously, we mentioned that some screens in Media Center were new to this version while others were carry-overs from Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. You might be wondering what actually changed. The Start screen is all-new in Windows Vista Media Center. When TV, video, or a DVD movie is playing (but not, oddly, a photo slide show), and you return to the Start screen, the Start screen is overlayed over the video, 13-9. Previously, the video would be seen playing back in a small picture-in-picture (PIP)-type window in the lower left of the screen. What’s odd is that many subpages revert to the old way of doing things. For example, if you access the Program Info for a playing video, TV show, or other movie content (by right-clicking the screen and choosing Program Info, or clicking the More Info button on the Media Center remote), you’ll see that the video pops into a PIP window and isn’t overlayed by the screen, 13-10. You’ll find inconsistencies like that throughout Media Center. Remember, Microsoft has only partially realized its vision for the next generation Media Center. Updates are coming in the ensuing years that will use the video overlay style in all Media Center screens. As for now, there are only two places to see this overlay: The Start page and the Program Guide.

Exploring the Media Center Experiences Media Center offers a rich and exciting way to access live and recorded television shows and movies, digital photos, home videos, digital music, and other digital media content, and it works equally well on a notearticle, your desktop PC, or via an HDTV display in your living room. In this section, we’ll examine the various digital media experiences offered by Media Center.

TV and Movies The television experience sits up front and center in Windows Media Center, although it’s likely that many Windows Vista users will not have a TV tuner card installed in their system, let alone one that is connected to and controlling their TV source (cable, satellite, or whatever). That’s too bad: Although much of Media Center is exciting, its TV capabilities are the most impressive and quite superior to competing digital video recording (DVR) solutions like TiVo. Let’s take a look.

Live TV Assuming you went through the TV signal wizard described earlier in this article, you should be able to click the Live TV button on your remote (or select Live TV from the TV + Movies entry on the Media Center Start screen) and begin watching live TV immediately. Using your remote, you can change channels, view a program guide (see the section “TV and Movie Guides” later in this article), pause, rewind, and restart live TV, and perform all the other options you’d expect from a normal television.

One caveat: If you’re using an IR blaster to control your cable box or satellite dish, you may notice that some operations, like changing channels, are quite a bit slower than they were when you accessed these devices directly. That’s because Media Center has to translate the commands you press on the remote, send the control codes for the device via IR, and then wait while the device performs whatever action you requested. Because of this slowness, you won’t be able to quickly move through the channels to see what’s on. No big loss, however: The integrated Program Guide and recording functionality largely eliminates this need. One very cool feature of the TV, movie, and video experiences in Media Center is that playing content will continue to play in the background of the screen if you navigate back to the Start screen or the program guide. The effect is somewhat stunning. To return to Live TV, press Back or the Live TV button.

Recorded TV Live TV is neat, but it’s so twentieth century, and as you begin using Media Center, you’ll quickly discover that it’s so much better to record television and then watch it at your own convenience. Doing so has three big benefits when compared to live TV. You can skip over commercials and watch just the show itself. You can pause live TV if interrupted by the phone or some other annoyance. You can watch the show on your schedule, not the TV networks. Forget must-see TV. You can watch what you want, when you want. And like live TV in Media Center, you can, of course, pause, rewind, and fast forward recorded TV. There are many, many ways to record TV shows in Media Center. But the best way is to use Media Center’s search capabilities to locate the shows you want. Then, you can configure it to record individual shows (like when you want to record a movie) or a series (for popular shows like Lost or The Office where you don’t want to miss a single show).

1. To search for a show to record, navigate to the Start screen, TV + Movies, and then Search. 13-11, you’ll see a variety of ways to search, including by title, keyword, categories, movie actor, or movie director.

2. For TV shows, the title is often the way to go. Choose Title and then type in the beginning of the show title until you see the show you want, as seen in article 13-12.

3. Select the show name from the list and you’ll be brought to a screen where you

Some popular syndicated shows, like “The Simpsons,” are on multiple times a day on multiple channels. Newer shows, meanwhile, that are running for the first time, will usually be on less frequently and only on one station. One exception to this rule: Many TV providers now supply two versions of local TV stations, one in standard definition and one in high definition (HD). Typically, it’s advisable to record HD shows on the HD version of the station on which it appears. And vice versa. • To record an individual show, select it from the list and click the Record button on your remote. (Alternatively, right-click the show title and choose Record.) You’ll see a red circle appear next to the show, indicating that the show will record. • To record a series, press the Record button twice (or right-click and choose Record Series). 13-13, multiple red circles will appear next to the show, and possibly next to other episodes shown in the list.

For series recordings, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re recording exactly what you want. To do this, right-click one of the episodes that is marked with multiple red circles, and then choose Series Info (or select and click More Info on the remote). On the Series Info screen, you’ll see the list of episodes that is currently scheduled to record. Click Series Settings to configure how the series will record. On the Series Settings screen, you can choose when the recording will stop (on time, or some number of minutes after it’s scheduled to end); which recording quality level to use (always choose Best); how long to keep each episode (until space is needed, until I watch, until I delete, and so on); how many recordings to keep at a time; which channels to record from; when to record; and which types of shows to record (first run only, or first run and rerun). You will want to spend some time configuring these options, both in general

(via TV in Settings) or for individual shows. For example, if you know that a particular show always runs three minutes late, be sure to configure it to record late in Series Settings. You can view and configure various recorded TV shows and features from the Recorded TV screen. Just choose View Scheduled to see a list of shows that will be recorded in the future, view all of the series you’re recording, and see a list of the shows you recorded in the past.

TV and Movie Guides Media Center has always provided a free program guide, which shows you a listing of the shows available on your TV provider. You can use this guide to view what’s on right now, and what’s coming up. It’s also a handy way to find shows to record: If you happen to get a high-quality HDTV station, for example, you can scroll through the timeline on just that station and see what’s coming up, marking shows and movies to be recorded as you go. To discover more about an individual show, select it in the guide and choose More Info. To watch a show that is on right now, simply select it. You can also filter the guide to show only the types of shows you want to see: To do, click the Guide button while in the guide (or click the Categories bar at the left of the guide) and then select Most Viewed, Movies, Sports, Kids, News, or Special. 13-14, this can be a huge boon for sports fans, or anyone else who wants to filter through the programming chaff and come up with only those shows that interest them.

Although Media Center’s program guide is nothing new, there is a new Movie Guide in this version that’s worth exploring. It replaces the Movies functionality from Media Center 2005; that feature was pretty cool, but it was buried deep in the My TV section of the user interface. The Movie Guide provides a handy front end to all the movies that are available now and in the near future on your cable system or other TV source. Shown in article 13-15, this feature is hugely graphical, using DVD box art to help you visually navigate through the list of available choices.

DVDs As you might expect, Media Center is an excellent DVD player too, offering virtually all of the functionality of a standalone DVD player. When you insert a DVD movie into the PC while Media Center is running, it will start immediately. From there, you can use the DVD button on your remote to return to the DVD’s main menu, or the remote-based or onscreen playback controls to, well, control playback.

Whether you’re watching TV, a movie, a video, or a DVD, be sure to experiment with Media Center’s excellent Zoom feature, which cycles between four different zoom modes: Normal (1), Zoom (2), Stretch (3), and Smart (4). Users with widescreen displays will want to check out smart zoom, because it intelligently zooms standard definition 4:3 content in such a way that it fills the entire screen without making people onscreen look stretched.

Pictures and Videos In previous versions of Media Center, Picture and Videos were separate experiences. For some reason, Microsoft has lumped them together in the Windows Vista version, and we feel that’s a mistake, as pictures (typically digital photos) and videos (which can be home movies, certainly, but really any kind of digital video) are two entirely different things. Opinions aside, they’re represented together now under the Pictures + Videos menu off the Start screen. You’ll see two main items there, Picture Library and Video Library, as well as a few other options like Play All and More Pictures.

Pictures The Pictures experience in Windows Media Center is accessed via the Pictures Library item in the Start screen. 13-16, it’s sorted by name by default and includes nice-looking thumbnails of the subfolders and pictures contained in your Pictures folder. You can choose to sort the library by date, as well, or run a slide show of all of your pictures from this screen.

When you navigate into a folder that contains individual photos, you’ll see that the options remain the same: You can navigate horizontally through the collection of pictures, sort by name or date, or start a slide show.

To access the hidden Pictures options, right-click (or press the More Info remote button) on any selected photo or folder. You’ll see a number of options, including Burn (covered later in this article), View Small, Library Setup, and Settings. • View Small will change the thumbnail images to smaller icons, which may make it easier to find content when there are many files being displayed. • Library Setup brings you to the watch folder wizard that we discussed previously in Configuring Your Digital Media Libraries earlier in this article. • The Settings option navigates you to Media Center Settings. Here, you can choose Pictures and modify how slide shows work, 13-17.

You should really change some of those slide show settings. For example, you might want the pictures to display randomly and might find the default display time of 12 seconds to be quite a bit too long.

Videos The Videos experience in Windows Media Center is inconveniently accessed via the Video Library item in the Pictures + Videos section of the Start screen. Video Library is sorted by folders by default (or date taken, optionally) and includes nice-looking thumbnails of the subfolders and movies contained in your Video folder. When you click on a video, it begins playing immediately, 13-18. You can use the onscreen controls (in 2-foot mode) or the playback controls on your remote control to pause, fast forward, and perform other playback-related functions.

Curiously, there are no video-related options in the Media Center Settings screen. Despite this, you can right-click anywhere in Video Library and choose Settings. From there you can set various settings for other Media Center features, but not videos.