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Netflix has a great plugin for Windows Media Center. In my opinion it is th best interface for Netflix’s Watch Instantly catalog. The onlt drawback is it can be difficult to browse for a movie without being overwhelmed.

Netflix really needs to add a “Most Popular” view in their Watch Instantly interface. It would help me wade through all the crap that is in their streaming catalog. Luckily a website, Instantwatcher.com, fills that niche for now.

Instantwatcher is a fairly simplistic website. It provides lists of movies available for streaming through Netflix. You can sort movies by Most Popular, New & Noteworthy, or even Expiring. If you find yourself wtaching more and more streaming movies and show through Netflix, take a look at Instantwatcher.com to see what you have been missing.

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The Windows Team Blog has the scoop on the newly released Ceton InfiniTV 4 digital cable tuner card, which Media Center enthusiasts have been waiting on for some time. Last November, changes to industry policy allowed for the installation of digital cable tuner cards to any Windows PC that supported them.

Now, thats a very real possibility with the new InfiniTV 4 card.

The card outperforms most cable companies DVRs by a longshot, allowing you to record up to four live channels of HDTV at once. It offers support for regular, HD and premium channels, too.

The card interoperates with Windows Media Center and its Extenders like the Xbox 360, allowing you to ditch the monthly DVR rental fee you pay to your cable company today. Instead, you install the card and then just stream live or recorded TV from the PC where its installed to the other PCs and TVs (via extenders) around the home.

The card is designed for desktop computers, not laptops, but will support slim entertainment PCs thanks to its PCI Express Low Profile form factor. The company says an external USB-attached version and other form factors are currently in the works for laptop users and those on other platforms.

The Ceton InfiniTV 4 card has a Suggested Retail Price of $399.00 and is available to pre-order today from Zones.com. Pre-ordered units will ship mid-2010. Over time, it will arrive in brick-and-mortar and online stores as well as in PCs built by OEMs.

To see if your PC supports the card, check out the system requirements here.

The popular Windows Media Center plugin, TunerFreeMCE, has been updated in a release the developer, Martin Millmore, is calling a major upgrade. The new plugin is now Windows 7-only, forgoing Vista support in order to allow for the numerous improvements it includes.

Vista users can continue to use the older version of the plugin, though. The developer says that two-thirds of the plugins users are on Windows 7, so he made the decision to make improvements the majority can enjoy.

So whats new in this release? Things users have been asking for, including:

• A new popup screen for managing the TV programs, allowing you to play the program, set a timer recording to record other showings of the program if you have a TV tuner configured, and if the program supports it you can add it to a playlist or download it (the last two work for BBC WMV programs, but not flash).
• When playing flash content, sometimes the mouse didn’t click in the right place. Now you can mode the cursor round the screen with the remote by pressing the cursor keys, and OK to click. This allows you to play even the most troublesome programs.
• The interface is now touchscreen enabled, so if you have a touchscreen media center you can easily navigate through the screens.
• Plugins are now directly available within the application. When you go to preferences you will see a list of plugins. When you pick one, the system will take care of installing and updating it to keep you up to date with your favorite content.
• MSN has been removed. This is because there is now a native media center app to support MSN.
• Improved memory management – only one instance of TunerFreeMCE will be active at any one time

If youve never tried TunerFreeMCE before, I recommend checking it out. Its a great plugin for watching streaming Internet video on your PC and Media Center extender, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five for UK users and Hulu support for US users. Believe it or not, the plugin is actually free. However, donations are accepted.

(via Ian Dixon)

For those that dont know, Windows 7 comes with a feature called Windows Media Center. Windows Media Center can be used to turn any Windows PC into a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) when a TV card is present in the PC. Windows Media Center also comes with Internet TV which provides free access to shows and movies streamed across the Internet. Windows Media Center is designed to be used with big displays. People can connect their Windows PCs to their HDTVs and use Windows Media Center to display content. In this post Im going to talk about my own setup in my living room which is powered by Windows 7 and Windows Media Center.

A little over 3 years ago, I published a blog post about my Windows Media Center PC and setup in my living room. That post was celebrating the 5th anniversary of Windows Media Center. This year it celebrated its 8thanniversary and I still have that very same PC I blogged about 3 years ago running my all-things digital entertainment in my living room but with Windows 7 of course! That PC – a CineMagix Grand Theater Entertainment System from Velocity Micro has probably been on and recording tons of TV shows for 90% of those 3 years. Its held up pretty well. Over the course of the last 3 years, Ive done a few things to the PC such as adding Blu-ray. But I think after 3 years, I decided it needed a more substantial upgrade: a new graphics card and a new TV tuner card with better capabilities.

Note: In the rest of this post, I am going to be talking a lot about cards such as graphics cards or TV cards. These cards are components to PCs that add and provide functionality. For example a graphics card provides the graphics capabilities for the PC and a TV card provides TV capabilities. There are sound cards and network cards too you can probably guess what those cards do

For the last 3 years, my Windows Media Center PC has been running with a pretty decent graphics card (an ATI Radeon X1950) but it didnt have HDMI. I had been using a DVI-to-HDMI cable to connect to my HDTV. But I wanted to go native with straight HDMI. Back in March, I had posted about HDMI and Windows PCs. I recommend giving this post a read for understanding the benefits of HDMI especially in the particular scenario my Windows Media Center PC is serving in my living room with my TV. I also wanted to have a DirectX 11 capable graphics card in this system. So I went out and picked up one of AMDs low cost DirectX 11 capable graphics cards (with HDMI!): an ATI Radeon HD 5450. I will likely upgrade this card again to something more higher-end in the future (likely a graphics card with more onboard memory) but for now this works perfectly for my needs.

Next was the TV tuner card. When I bought this PC from Velocity Micro, it came with a TV tuner card that supported CableCARD or digital cable tuner. When digital cable tuners were first introduced, they were only available as part of a new PC. Whats a CableCARD? A CableCARD is a special PC card that you can lease from your cable company (U.S. only) that can be used with a digital cable tuner to view and record digital cable TV channels (pay TV channels like DiscoveryHD or HistoryHD as well as premium channels like HBOHD and ShowtimeHD) without the need for a special set top box such as a DVR unit from a cable provider. A TV card that supports CableCARD has a slot in the back that allows a CableCARD to be put in. With a digital cable tuner card in a PC, you can use Windows Media Center to watch and record digital cable TV channels – and in HD!

The TV card that came with the PC was an ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner. At the time, it was top-of-the-line. However, there were draw backs that over the years have grown into a little bit of some frustration. For example this digital cable tuner card was a single tuner. That means that you couldnt watch and record different channels at the same time. Whatever you were recording at any given time, you had to watch it too you could not change the channel. There were many times where I wanted to watch something and record something else at the same time.

This is where the new Ceton InfiniTV 4 digital cable tuner card comes in.

Last November, we announced it would be possible to add a digital cable tuner card to any Windows PC that supported it. Because of this, I could now replace my current TV tuner with something newer on my own. Cetons new InfiniTV 4 TV card is a brand new PCIe 1x digital cable tuner that is hitting the market that includes 4 tuners in one card! That means with the InfiniTV 4 TV card, I can watch a TV show at the same time Im recording 3 other shows at the same time. At any given time, in Windows Media Center you could be recording up to 4 HDTV shows at the same time. For me the InfiniTV 4 offered an incredible upgrade to my Windows Media Center PC. Cetons work here with their InfiniTV 4 TV tuner card this a great example of a product from one of our partners that takes Windows to a whole different level and makes a good feature (Windows Media Center) great.

After I completed the upgrade of my Windows Media Center PC – my living rooms digital entertainment experience was simply awesome. Recording multiple TV shows while watching another is amazing. However, I foresee another upgrade in my future: more storage! Im running out of hard drive space from recording so many TV shows!

Do you want to add one of Cetons new digital cable tuners to your Windows PC? In Windows Media Center, you can use the Digital Cable Advisor Tool (located under the Extras gallery) to check if your PC is capable of running a digital cable tuner. If your PC checks out and has a spare PCIe 1x slot, you can buy a Ceton InfiniTV 4 here. Ceton has begun shipping units to those who have pre-ordered and people are starting to see them arrive this week.

I suggest visiting the website The Green Button as it is a great place to find Windows Media Center and home entertainment experts to help you out if you need assistance or any tips or tricks integrating your Windows PC with your TV!

Lifextender is a simple plugin for Windows Media Center designed to remove advertisements from recorded TV shows automatically. Generally a sitcom/drama is 20-25 minutes long but considering the full video playback length, it can extends up to 40 minutes due to the inclusion of commercials after regular time interval. Dealing with such situation needs patience or a fast forwarding is required. It is built to help those users who hate the idea of even manually forward the ads and are in need of an application which can root out commercials right from the start.

It sits in the system tray to let user quickly scan the Media Center library. On finding a show carrying commercials, the progress window will pop-up to uncommercialize the show.

Click Skip to Jump on the next show, if you need to cancel the process, just click Cancel button.

For configuring advanced options, open configuration window from system trays icon. It offers multitude of options and features to customize the overall behavior. Under General Settings, you can set TV Recording path, enable Automated library scanning, configure other settings such as; dumping original file (carrying commercials), removing duplicate TV shows, etc. The More Settings tab refers to the main working directory, output directory, and other post-process options.

It also let user create rules, which helps in filtering out specific episodes, channels, movies from the process.

It is helpful for users who are looking for a simple way to remove advertisements from TV Shows. Its intuitive mechanism of finding out commercials is remarkable, which lets user easily get rid of advertisements. The application works on Windows Vista and Windows 7. We tested it on Windows 7 x86 system.

Download Lifextender