Charlie Owen, who was on the original Windows Media Center team has posted the entirety of the WMC SDK to GitHub for any and all to work on. This means that for those who miss it, you may have a reason to dig out that Hauppauge card and install it in your Win10 machine. The Inquirer rightly points out that products like the Roku and software like Plex offer a better experience for most, however there are some limitations to these more modern replacements. Those who reside outside the US may find their streaming choices limited on new platforms, and there are those who have yet to cut the cord completely in order to retain locally broadcast content.
Those people now have a new hope.
"Microsoft has long since removed the download link for WMC from its website, and Owen felt that he would be "preserving a bit of history for the diaspora that created Windows Media Center"."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Microsoft is ditching those pointless self-expiring passwords that everyone hates @ The Inquirer
- Sophos antivirus tools. Working Windows box. Latest Patch Tuesday fixes. Pick two: 'Puters knackered by bad combo @ The Register
- Amazon's Alexa staffers allegedly have access to users' home addresses @ The Inquirer
- TSMC 12-inch fab capacity still in oversupply @ DigiTimes
I would kill for a properly
I would kill for a properly open sourced wmc. Just like how the orignal Windows Media Player became Mpc-HC. I would love for this to become the same time. What it needs is mkv support, soft sub functionality and not a tonne more to make it practical. Also because it uses the same back end as the modern windows media player sharing my music folder from my main pc over the network and adding it to the wmc music library on another networked computer made all my music and playlists available everywhere in my house.
In the unpopular opinion section, kodi and all these other htpc interfaces are honestly terrible. They still need a mouse and keyboard from time to time while emc can 100% be used with a remote.
The music now playing screen is beautiful simple, with scrolling albumart in the background and moving trak information in the foreground to prevent screen burnins, it was well thought out, beautiful and whenever i fired it up to play music with guests over, it always made them go. “oh wow” because of how cool, yet tasteful it was.
No other piece of software ever came close to this functionality or even bothered to straight up rip it off.
Although Musicbee and Amazon music have copied a lot of the old Zune desktop software, no one has ever aped WMC’s simplicity and useability.
You can configure Kodi to be
You can configure Kodi to be used with a remote, although you need to be careful with what skin you use – Horizon would be my choice for a TV but Aura is very good. In practice though it is better to have a small touch pad/keyboard combo if only for typing in names. I believe that the Kodi community has got Alexa support working but having that baked into the Kodi base code would be an interesting way of controlling it.
I loved WMC, I used it for several years with the MyMovies.de add on which may it really fly. The problem was that MS had stopped supporting it years before they finally killed it so there was minimal 3rd party add ons. In terms of adding in a TV card or 2 I watching TV (and recording to play back later) it is still pretty much the gold standard.
IMO the advent of streaming services means that we need something new from WMC/Kodi or whatever other package you use to consume media. It has to be able to connect with all the streaming services you use and ultimately we need someone to write an add on that allows you to do enter a single search term and that add on search through all your subscription services in one go to find what you are looking for. Amazon however appears determined to complete nix that possibility for Prime Video on things like Kodi even though it has proper DRM built into the latest Kodi version. That might give a new WMC a way back into our homes