Microsoft just announced that they will be holding a contest to find the most creative home theator setup that incorporates Windows Media Center. Here is a quote from the site.

“Microsoft is looking for the finest and most creative installation utilizing Windows Media Center in a residential system. Submit your best Windows Media Center project for the opportunity to win a vacation for two and visit to the Microsoft campus as well as recognition for as the design and installation firm who built the Ultimate Media Center Install!”

The contest Began on March 13th 2008 and will stop accepting entries on August 1st 2008. They are looking for businesses that incorporates the best custom home theator solution in a customers house. Here are some of the judging criteria.

• Use of Windows Media Center as primary user interface (UI) for media consumption in room or system (depending on scope of install)
• Use of Windows Media Center experiences (e.g., television, music, video, pictures, DVD library, etc.)
• Integration with other, non-PC consumer electronics devices
• Technical merit
• Creativity and originality

And the best part, there are tons of great prizes to be won! Here are some of them.

• An all-expense paid trip for one to CEDIA Expo 2008 in Denver, Colorado, including round-trip airfare, 3-night hotel accommodation in Denver, and participation in a Press Cocktail event announcing the winner
• A trip for 2 to Microsoft, round-trip airfare, 2-night hotel accommodation at the Bellevue Westin and a special VIP day at Microsoft that includes a $1000 cash, a visit to the Microsoft eHome Custom Install (CI) demo room, time with the eHome team focused on the CI channel, and a private tour of the Microsoft MSHome.
• A full-day photo shoot to have professional photographs taken of your winning solution
• A story featuring your entry, interview, and pictures from the photo shoot posted on the CE Installer website
• A Technology Appreciation Package for the homeowner provided by Microsoft that consists of:
  • Xbox360 Elite video game and entertainment system
  • 4 Black Xbox360 Wireless Controllers
  • 1 Xbox360 Media Center Remote
  • 1 Year Xbox Live Subscription
  • 4 Xbox360 Game Titles (actual titles to be determined by sponsor)
  • 1 80GB Zune, 1 8GB Zune, and a Zune Home AV Kit

So if your an owner of a company that does these sort of custom solutions, head over to Microsoft and submit an entry. I wonder if I could tell them that I’m a company who did a custom solution for myself and send snapshots of my setup…

• Combined Community Codec Pack
• Transcode360.

Download and install both applications before continuing. Make sure that your Xbox is already interfacing with your computer via Windows Media Center. If you don’t know how to do that, read this post.

Connect to your PC with your Xbox 360

Open up the Media blade in your Xbox 360 Dashboard and Select Media Center (Sorry the only decent screenshot I could find was in Japanese).

2. Select My Videos from the menu

Press the X button on your controller to get the context menu and select More

Now Select Transcode

At this point the video file should start playing. If you plan on transcoding high-def files (.mkv, .orb, etc…) make sure you have a fast PC. I tried this with a lame celeron 1.4 and 512 ram and could not get past the first 10 seconds of the high-def videos. Regular videos worked great though.

Windows Media Center only recognizes a handful of video types, so if you navigate to your video folder and don’t see anything, you need to add that video type to the registry. Read this post to learn how to do this. Good luck!

Troubleshooting

One of our readers (Mike) has solved the issue of .mkv files playing for only a few seconds and then ending.  The solution is quite simple acctually.  The way transcode 360 works is, it takes the video file and writes to a temporary file (or buffer) that’s in a format your 360 can understand.  This file then gets sent to be played via your Xbox 360. The problem is, the Xbox 360 is playing the video file faster than Transcode 360 can encode it.  So basically what is happening is your 360 is reading from that file and reaches then end of it.  The solution… Once the video file starts playing, hit pause on your remote or use the controller to navigate to the video menu.  Allow maybe 5-10 minutes.  This will give Transcode 360 time to buffer the video file.  After that hit play and you should be on your way to HD glory.  If the video freezes again at some point.  Just hit pause again and allow the buffer to fill up again.  That’s all.  It’s so simple.  Thank you to Mike for the tip. Happy Xboxing!

The Tutorial: How to Install Windows Vista on a Mac – Apple Computer

Want to do it yourself? Very simple! Just follow these instructions.

Note: Make sure you are running an intel based mac. Otherwise it will not work.

1) Download and install Bootcamp from Apple.
2) Follow the installation process and make sure to have your new Windows Vista and Vista product key handy.
3) When you create the partition, make it about 32 gb. If you cannot create the partition, defragment your hard drive, then try again.
4) I created the “Macintosh Drivers CD” but frankly, I did not have to use them. But create it just in case.

That is it, the install process took about 45min and after I was done, it just worked! One thing to note, is that my machine started to default boot to windows Vista, I did not like that very much. So when you restart, just hold down the “option” key on your keyboard until two little hard drives pop up then you can choose between them.

Any questions or problems, feel free to comment!

1.) Make sure you have all of the right codecs installed for the media you want to player.

• The best codec pack, in my opinion is the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP). Download it here.
• After installing that, reboot your computer

2.) Get your reg-hack on!

• Open up the registry editor by clicking Start > run. In the box type regedit
• Warning: editing the registry can be dangerous for the novice user. Be sure to create a registry backup before attempting to edit.

• Creating a registry backup
  • Click File > Export.
  • Choose a location and a name for the backup and click Save
  • If you mess up the registry, you can enter windows in safe mode and restore it using this backup file.

• Click the + sign next to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT , you should now see a bunch of file extensions.
• Navigate to the file type that you want to view in WMC (if it is not there, post a comment and i will add a note about adding new keys)
• Once you find the file type that you want to play, click on its folder icon.
• Right click anywhere in the right content box and select New > String Value
• Name this value Content Type, press enter, and then double click on it.
• In the box labeled Value data:, enter in video/[type] – type being the file extension. So for .mkv it would be video/mkv
• Click Ok
• Now add another String value and name it PerceivedType
• Give this string the value of video

Now all you have to do is restart WMC and navigate back to that movie folder and you should see the new video files.

overview:
Get your xbox 360 to play High Definition files (.tc, .dvr-ms, .x264, .avi, .mpeg, .mpeg2, .mkv, etc.) from Windows Vista using Windows Media center (WMC).

Quick Steps:
This assumes the following:

• Your xbox 360 and your computer running vista are on the same network.

1) First, inside of Windows Media Center, add your Xbox 360 as an extender. To do that, do the following:

• Open Windows Media Center and click on “Add Extender”

• Turn On your Xbox 360 and Click on the “Media Center” icon. This should now connect you to your Vista WMC. Click next until you see an 8 digit key.
• Enter that 8 digit key into your WMC on vista.

• Follow the steps on your computer.
• That’s it, it is added.

2) Now you can try and play a video file. But, they will not work! That is because Vista comes with only a few codecs. So here is where we split up, if you want to watch HDTV with your HD tuner card, go to step 2a, if you want to play torrented or I mean other video files, go to step 2b.

2a) If you want to watch HDTV on your Xbox 360, here is all you have to do.

• Make sure you already have an HD tuner card for your computer, if you do not, I would reccommend the AverMedia A180.
• If you have already done that, and you are trying to watch tv or hdtv, chances are that you are getting a “decoder error” or some other error type. Well the answer is very simple. Codecs, And all the ones you need are found in one place. Read on…
• Download your Codecs Here – From the CCCP Combined Community Codec Pack. Don’t worry, they work in Vista Just fine.
• Now just install it as you would anything else. And that is it! Now you can play high-definition tv on your xbox 360. Sweet!

2b) Read the post in this blog on transcode 360.

That is it! If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment.

Pros

• Windows Vista looks much cooler! And more than that, it actually ad?s to the experience of using my computer. It is not just fluff, it actually helps productivity.
• Search is much better! I had resulted to using Google desktop search on Windows XP, and that was great, but it had its downsides. But now the search, although taking a while to get used to, is MUCH faster, and coherent. No more dumb little dogs trying to teach me how to search.

• Icons – This may seem like an infinitesimal point, but the truth is, is that the icons are so much better! They are dynamic. The folder Icon will change depending on what is inside the folder, if there are images inside, the folder icon will show those images, and if there are more folders, you will see those. A great idea, and it makes things a lot easier.

• Remember Alt+Tab? Forget it… the new hotkey for windows is WindowsKey+Tab. A new, very intuitive way to organize your open programs.
• My Documents organization. Vista got rid of “My Documents” and gave us a folder for our user with more things than just documents, we now have; Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Links, Pictures, Saved Games, Searches, Videos, and Music. This is much more intuitive. Because it is really simple to get to folders quicker now.

• Favorite Links – This is great! Now you can customize what folders you want to be able to access quickly via Windows Explorer. Greatly increases workflow!

• Windows Media Center – WMC has been completely revamped! Much cleaner, and fixed a lot of issues in the other version! Great job Bill!

Con’s

• Needless computer resource usage… Vista comes with gadgets, one of the gadgets is the CPU usage meter, and now it just makes me upset. Randomly, the computer will take 90% of my resources for the better part of a minute, for nothing. And it bugs me…
• Horrible memory usage… Vista just hogs memory! No wonder you need a “Vista Ready” computer, because most computers can’t handle it’s high memory usage.
• Buggy, buggy, buggy – Firefox 2.0 just will not run on Vista with any consistency, and I will blame Microsoft before I blame Mozilla. Whenever my computer is idle for more than an hour or so, most of my programs will time out. I do not have any hibernation or hard drive suspending on, it just errors out and takes about 40 seconds before Vista will respond to any mouse movement.
• Folder Navigation – I was used to Windows XP, it left much to be desired but at least I had my “Up one level” folder button. They got rid of it, and leave you with just the back button! What is up with that! They have this semi-intuitive way of going back to a parent folder, but I think it fails more than it succeeds, that is why it is in the CON pile.
• Security Crap – The fist thing I did when I got Vista was disabled al lof the security junk. And there is so much of it now! I do not like it! If you ask me, the dumb computer users are the ones who need the security stuff becuase they are the ones who get viruses. Oh well…
• The biggest con that I can think of is this: I was asked by a friend to tell him what were the big things that they changed from xp to vista? And I found myself searching for an answer. If it takes over 5 years, millions of dollars and millions of hours of time, there better be a clear answer… and frankly, there wasn’t. And that is bad.

Conclusion
I like Vista. It is not Windows XP SP3 as some have said, but it does not have any huge reason for someone to switch over to Vista. I would like to equate this to a car. Most cars change very little from year to year. Sometimes what they change is just the body and a couple of things on the inside, while the engine, components, drive, feel, price, and everything else stays the same. That is how I feel Vista is. They changed the body and a couple inside amenities, but that is about it. No reason to go and buy a new car if you r current car is almost the same, just a little older.

Let’s start off with a “What you need” list (assuming you have the obvious: WMC PC, Xbox 360, High Def TV):

• The most important thing is a wireless router that supports 802.11a. I personally use the Netgear WAG102.
• You need the Xbox 360 Wireless Networking Adapter.
• You will need an almost un-obstructed view from your router to your Xbox 360. My set-up has a half wall and a refrigerator and bout 60 feet before it gets to my Xbox 360.
• The know how to set-up your wireless network with the xbox 360. If you need help with this, make a comment.

That really is it… Very simple. And, a solid HDTV signal will be sent from your PC to your Xbox 360!