MCE Overview

Once setup is complete, you can launch the MCE desktop via the remote control by pressing the green button. Here's a picture of the MCE User Interface once it starts up. If you do not have a TV Tuner card installed you will see something similar to this:

If you have the TV Tuner installed, you will get the following:

The familiar “My ..” paradigm fills the entire GUI landscape. We'll provide a deeper look into the Media Center Edition OS later on. In the meantime, I'll list some of the highlights of the new OS.

MCE has the following categories:

• Play DVD – allows you to play any DVDs inserted into the DVD drive
• Online Spotlight – allows you to connect to online MSN services and third party services
• My Videos – allows you to browse through your video collections.
• My Pictures – allows you to browse through your picture collections
• My TV – allows you to view and record Live TV
• My Music – allows you to browse through your music collections.
• More Programs – allows you to launch other MCE enabled applications.
• Settings – allows you to configure MCE settings

For each selection, MCE will display the last three actions associated to the selection. This is a great way to instantly go back to what you were doing at any point.

Play DVD

So you have a DVD and you're dying to play it in your MCE system – well remember one thing – you need to have a DVD decoder installed on your PC. You probably already did so if you also wanted to perform TV Tuner capabilities on your PC but in case you didn't, we remind you again that you need to install one. On our MCE system, we installed WinDVD 6 and it worked wonderfully.

Whenever you insert a new DVD into your system, MCE will ask you if you want to go ahead and play the DVD. If you don't make a decision within a few seconds, MCE will assume that you wanted to play the DVD and will begin to do so.

Once your DVD is playing, you can freely move about the MCE GUI. The video will continue to play back in a small window on the lower left hand corner – ah picture in picture at its very best! The video will continue playing until you either press the stop button or you begin to play a different media file.

Online Spotlight

The Online Spotlight is actually one of my favorite destinations on my MCE system. From here, you can peruse a number of third party online sites that are specifically designed for the MCE.

As an example, you can select ESPN motion and download ESPN video clips for that day or you can connect to MSN TV Today and see video clips from various MSN news feeds. More and more third party vendors are releasing MCE optimized components that will make browsing the internet using this UI far more enjoyable. I love the Netflix interface that has been developed at unmitigatedrisk.com for the MCE GUI since I can now browse movies from within MCE and add them to my queue.

My Videos

The first time you select My Videos, you will be asked whether you want to add videos to your video library.

You can select any folder for MCE to scan through and look for video content. Our next pet project will be to create a network media server which will house all of our audio and video content. Then we can have MCE perform video on demand from these servers. By default, My Videos will look at the My Videos folder found on your “My Documents” section of your desktop.

My Pictures

As with “My Videos”, you will be asked to select a folder(s) to add pictures to your pictures library. My Pictures defaults to the “My Pictures” directory under your “My Documents” folder on your desktop.

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