Do you use Windows Media Center?

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

Do you use Windows Media Center?

If so, I really hope you have heard of Webguide, an application that was previously charged for (so great I bought it!)... however Webguide has recently (ish) been made available FREE courtesy of Microsoft!

For the uninitiated, let's just recap on what Media Center does. It runs as a special edition of XP or on some versions of Vista, and provides you with an optimised UI for viewing TV, Video, Music, Pictures etc. on your PC. It's primarily designed to be run on a large display with a remote control, and works great as a DVR (I have a Media Center box in my living room DVR'ing sky).

So what is Webguide? Webguide by asciiexpress takes your Windows Media Center content and brings it to the web. Through your browser you can then view your TV guide, set recordings (awesome!), watch streaming TV / recordings / videos / pictures, listen to music and much more! Actually, asciiexpress themselves put it much better than me...

WebGuide allows you to remotely view live and recorded TV programs and to remotely schedule and manage your recorded television programs, music, pictures and videos on your Media Center or Windows Vista PC. Install WebGuide on your Media Center PC and access it from any machine that has a web browser, including your cell phone or mobile device.

Convenient

• Live streaming TV can be viewed on any web browser
  
• Recordings can be scheduled from any web browser
  
• "Place-shifting" for your personal media library, including TV, music, pictures, videos and DVD's
  
• PocketPC and Smartphone enabled
  
• Windows Vista ready
  
  • Installation takes only minutes
    
  • User-friendly MCE interface
    
  • Languages include Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish
    

  Fast

  [*]Live scheduling without delays

  [*]Search by show, date or time

  [*]Quick access to recent and upcoming recordings

  Basically if you have Media Center and an Internet connection, you NEED this application... and that's why i'm telling you about it ;) Add Windows Mobile into the mix and it's even cooler, streaming your music and recordings directly to the device.

  As I said, it's now FREE to download, so go get it! :(

  P

  

[Guest robpow]

I've been using WebGuide on my Vista MCE for almost a year and it's been great. Especially clever features like batch transcode of recorded TV to WMV9 over night to save on space.

It will be interesting to see where Microsoft goes with it.

Matt

Edited October 25, 2007 by robpow

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

Yeah, indeed!

;)

P

[Guest Swampie]

It's not actually clear that MS are taking Webguide over, in fact he says:

"I'm excited to announce that I recently finalized a business deal with Microsoft to make WebGuide available to users for free and to become a member of the Media Center team. I'm joining an extremely talented group and will focus on pushing Media Center into the high-end custom installation market. The custom installation market is a terrific incubator for new ideas and technologies that will eventually benefit the larger Media Center community.

Since I will be busy doing that, I won't be busy creating new features for WebGuide. I will continue to monitor the Forums, make comments and provide updates for significant bugs."

Sounds like the deal is a one-off deal which makes WebGuide free to everyone, but that he's now dropping WebGuide (except for significant bug fixes) to do other things Media Center related in MS.

Edited October 26, 2007 by Swampie

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

Hopefully that means putting webguide into the core of MCE!

P

[Guest Swampie]

Hopefully that means putting webguide into the core of MCE!

P

If so, it'll probably be in Windows Vienna at the earliest... so approx 2010 based on their current plans - or maybe 2012 on experience.

[Guest deadphill]

Ive just found out about this (must have missed this post when I saw it) and have added it to my Windows Home Server.

All seems to run quite nicely on the laptop but when I want to access this through my kaiser I have no idea how to log on to be able to view/listen to my media.

Can anyone help? Is there a url structure I can follow so I can logon?

Thanks

Phill

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

http://yourservername:configuredport

:)

P

[Guest deadphill]

Hmm

I am using the packaged livenode address with my server. The port I am using is 444. This port has been opened using upnp on my router which is running dd-wrt.

When I enter http://myservername.livenode.com:444 I get a cannot be displayed message, this is when using opera and pie. I have tried https but still no joy.

Any ideas? Im not having a good day trying to run stuff here!!

Thanks

Phill

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

Manually map port 444 on your router to port 444 on your machine?

P

[Guest deadphill]

:)

I think Im banging my head against a brick wall here. I have tried entering this address in my browser on my pc and no joy. It seems the only way I can access this is through my login page on WHS.

I have manually added this port as well as it being mapped through UPNP. I dont know where if any there is a setting in this on my server which gives access any other way..

And no I cant log on though my phone by accessing this page. Ive tried using the wiki and the forums on the support pages but there is nothing there.

Its a shame I really wanted something like this for when I am out and about and bored!

[Guest deadphill]

I finally made some progress with this.

When using windows home server, the address to go to is http://yourservername.livenode.com/webguide/mobile.

After logging in you can get access to the interface.

The problem I have now of course is the fact that I cannot get any video to stream, at least over the Internet. I have just downloaded a wmv file which I have managed to get going on both my laptop at work and my ppc. Although the video had very bad performance in both issues. The first being that on the laptop I would get a sort of image but it would be more like a still that would sit there for about 20 seconds before updating to the next still. On the ppc, I get an audiostream but no picture.

I have tried this on the lowest possible settings for both devices.

So far as I can see you can only put on settings for codec use when streaming dvds. However I do have a multitude of codecs on the machine which all run natively on the server, just not on any other device.

I would really love to get this working properly but at the moment its a monumental task.

Any further help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Phill