Go to content Go to navigation Go to search

Windows Media Center done right

October 26th, 2008 by Manic

media-center-iconAfter talking about it for a very long time, I finally subscribed to Netflix. I think the excitement for the new Xbox 360 dashboard is the reason, but sadly it was playing the game Scene It and not knowing questions about recent movies is the straw the broke the camel’s back. The Netflix online streaming is cool, but I don’t want to do this in the browser, I want it in Media center. So I looked into the plugins that force feed the control into the Media center UI. While doing this I started looking into some other plugins that are really cool.

  1. vmcNetFlix:  I think this is the best Netflix plugin available because it does streaming to media center extenders. This point will be moot when the new Xbox dashboard comes out, but its handy in the meantime.
  2. My Movies: This is very good looking tool to organize the DVD movies that you have ripped to your hard drive. It’s very nicely integrated into the Media center experience
  3. EmuCenter: It’s a front end UI for video game emulators on the PC. Its a bit of a pain to setup and configure correctly, and you do need to download and install the game emulators yourself. But, once everything is configured its a good looking way to browse some good old games.